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Apr 29, 2010

Wha?

It's been snowing today and the Patterson book (Private - coming in June) was so easy to read, almost 400 pages smooth as silk. Great airplane book, providing your flight is only a couple of hours long!

Two arcs, request for a partial and authonomy.com

James Patterson's new one - called Private and Running Dark by Jamie Freveletti. Warm glow over the partial and I've discovered this cool site which has loads of unpublished authors' work called Authonomy.com. Run by HarperCollins it's an attempt to shake up the submission process. As if I didn't have enough to read:-)

Apr 28, 2010

Septimus didn't suck

and Stephen Chance wrote three more - two of which Septimus and the Minster Ghost and Stone of Offering are headed my way. The strange thing is that even when I started re-reading the book none of it came back to me. Our tiny library back home only had the first book and it never occurred to me that there might be more in the series. So when the next two arrive I really will be reading them for the first time!

Thoughts on Faithful Place

Just finished Faithful Place, Tana French's new one. Again set in Dublin but this delves deep into the families that live around Faithful Place. Frank Mackey the undercover cop who ran Cassie in the last book turns out to be all too human and wait until you meet his family. Some of them could give the Borgias lessons. Faithful Place is out in July - full review then.

Apr 27, 2010

The Hypnotist, M.J. Rose

Lucian Glass, in this life a rational FBI agent still haunted by a death he couldn’t prevent. But while his current investigation takes him across the world it seems his past lives in Persia and Ancient Greece have caught up with him. Since an unexplained mass hallucination and a near-death experience both of which took place in Vienna, Agent Glass has the mother of all headaches and a constant need to draw the faces of women he’s never met. In an attempt to maintain his sanity he goes undercover at the Phoenix Foundation and allows himself to be hypnotized.

In the meantime the modern day Persians are determined to reclaim their property, a once magnificent statue bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Agent Glass’s cases are about to collide head on.

Apr 23, 2010

God of the Hive - Laurie King

Following on from last year’s ‘Language of Bees’ King continues her tale. Arrest warrants are still out for Mary Russell, her husband Sherlock Holmes and young Damian Adler. Their forces are split with Holmes and a badly injured Adler going to ground on the continent while Mary and Adler’s young daughter crash land in the life of an eccentric former war veteran in the Lake District. But worse is to come, in London someone close to Holmes and Russell has gone missing, presumed dead which isn’t good news for Inspector Lestrade as he was the last man to see that person alive. Drawn back to a capital he hardly recognizes Holmes senses a changing of the guard. A new order is struggling to be born and it wishes to wipe out any traces of Holmes’ London including Holmes himself.

Apr 21, 2010

Bits n' Pieces

Finished Let the Great World Spin - so I can attend bookclub with a clear conscience. I liked the stories but the link between them, the tightrope walker, I want to know more about him.

Hubbie cancelled his trip - an hour before they re-opened UK airspace - ouch! So my plans have changed. Originally I was going to use the next couple of weeks to hammer out the faults in Tball - my lovely reading team have submitted their comments on that first draft and they all found the same five plot holes and made some excellent suggestions. I can still work on rewrites just not until 2am!

Thank you all for your in-store comments and e-mails about gmail. I feel less of an idiot now and I will always save my queries in plain text from now on.

Apr 19, 2010

In All My Sad Dreaming - John Caulfield

A noir thriller set against the stunning backdrop of South Africa's Cape Town. Captain James Blake, barely recovered from an attack which should have killed him, staggers from his hospital bed into the investigation of a bizarre murder of a Cape Town lawyer. Was it the law that got him killed or a musical feud?

Blake is having trouble maintaining his grip on reality while he wrestles with air-tight alibis, black widows, superstitions, buxom Thai mail order brides and possible perversions to the course of justice. An intriguing thriller that doesn't go the way you'd expect.

Apr 15, 2010

Septimus - hunted down

I've tracked down a copy of Septimus and the Danedyke mystery by Stephen Chance - used - because it went out of print years ago. Right now a copy is winging its way from Oregon to here. Septimus please don't suck!

On the arc front I finished Mr Peanut and am about to start the first of the South African based mysteries.

Apr 13, 2010

I play Russian Roulette with Gmail

Still reading Mr Peanut while sending out submissions. Got a request for a partial out of this morning's batch and that leads me to a question. Does anyone else have trouble with Gmail? Most of the time it behaves but (and this is huge,) on one of the queries it scrunched up the paragraphs and stripped out most of the punctuation reducing my carefully edited query to something akin to the scribblings of a two year old. So is anyone else playing russian roulette with their gmail or is it just me?

I have the new Tana French arc, The Faithful Place. I'm dying to read it, but have to blurb two others first. Oh and I have to re-read Septimus and the Danedyke Mystery. It's old, may even be out of print. We were discussing books we couldn't put down while I was visiting England and this one looms large in the printout of my library habits. Thing is I can't remember reading it so I want to know if this book has stood the test of time of course first I have to get a hold of a copy.

Apr 6, 2010

212, Alafair Burke

It began the night of May 27th. A 911 call to a shooting at one of New York’s most prestigious buildings the caller – an anonymous woman. NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher focuses on the building’s owner and ends up with a free night in jail for contempt of court.

While continuing to work the shooting, Hatcher and her partner Rogan catch the case of two female college students. One slain in her own apartment, the other hospitalized with stab wounds. When the survivor vanishes from her hospital bed, Hatcher and Rogan discover a connection between her and a high class escort murdered the same night. The detectives set about untangling a web of blackmail, corruption, scandal and murder before the killer they’re hunting takes out the last vital witness.

Angelology

The Angelology of the title is the study of Angels but not the heavenly host depicted in renaissance paintings. These beings are sons of the fallen angels, the Nephilim. As evil as they are beautiful interbreeding with humans has diluted their power they seek the means to purify their race once and for all. Their story spans generations from war-torn France in the thirties to present day New York and a tiny convent on the Hudson which contains a treasure so important to both sides that between them Abigail Rockefeller and Mother Innocenta of St Rose's Convent conspired to keep it safe. But on the eve of the new millennium, the Grigori family have discovered the significance of the convent and only the Angelologists and a handful of sisters stand in their way.

Refreshed and Recharged

My first day back and in between all the little things that help me re-adapt to life in good old SLC, like snow shoveling (I kid you not - it may be April but there was a wedding cake tier's worth on the ground this morning) and of course the quick trip out in the car chanting 'drive on the right, drive on the right' I've been keeping up with my reading.

Whilst we were away I read 'Locked Rooms' by Laurie King, been on my to-read pile for ages and like all King's Mary Russell novels well worth picking up. Wrote a short story and put a bunch of ideas down for my next nano project in November. I wasn't planning to come back with any books - except a copy of the The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest which came out in paperback the same week we left and was therefore sold out - everywhere. The best laid plans however got completely shelved and I got Angelology and Gone - the new Mo Hayder both in paper. Finished Angelology on the plane yesterday. Review to follow. For now will be reading and blurbing Mr Peanut by Adam Ross and Not Untrue and Not Unkind by Ed O'Loughlin.