Laura
I enjoyed the first one very much, and this one is as good for different reasons. The action moves out of Paris for some of the story, and the pace picks up with the change of location. So if you prefer the more fast and furious kind of paranormal story, then you will like those bits best. I do like fast and furious when it's well-done, but also subtle and classy, which is not common in modern paranormal novels. Sherry Roit can do classy, and that's the best thing about this Paris Immortal series - so far anyway. I find PK a bit boring, but that's a minor criticism, as the men are obviously meant to be the sparkly ones in these books.
The Americanisms scattered through the story are a little jolting to a British audience, but it doesn't spoil the fun.
Very good. The audio version by Jay Benedict isn't quite as good as in Paris Immortal. He confuses which character is talking at times, and Travis' accent wanders between vaguely Australian and upper class English. Still good though, and he voices Trey in his panicky moments very well. The story is another good one, continuing what we learned in the second book. The title is apt, as we find out more about the traumatic past of more than one character, and a certain amount of resolution is achieved. There is a bit more sex than previously, but still tastefully done. There are occasional gruesome scenes as you would expect in a vampire story, but they are not excessive. I'm looking forward to starting the fourth book.
I have hidden major spoilers to aid my memory. Read them at your peril.
Musical Boy runs away from his uncle's home and joins up with 2 children to go on adventures. The baddy wants to steal and sell the boy's valuable violin. He and his henchman butler kidnap him, and when he escapes, pursue him across the Shropshire countryside
Children's story, scarier than a Blyton, but scary situations resolved pretty quickly.
I know I'm going to hate a book when the main characters start having lustful fantasies about each other in the midst of a head-long dash for survival. I mean whilst actually running for the human's life, not during a momentary rest. No one would do that, it's ridiculous. If an author is shoe-horning sexy times into an inappropriate scenario like this, it says very very amateurish to me. So not going to waste my time again.
Modern addition to the Sherlock Holmes canon. It's WW2 and someone has invented a way to cause people to spontaneously combust, seemingly without outside interference. Sherlock & Watson are supposedly based on the Basil Rathbone duo, although Watson seems a lot more intelligent and capable than he was in those films, as does Lestrade. Plenty of adventures, with life-threatening peril. It was convincing as a Conan Doyle copy, and an enjoyable read.
It's a pleasant enough story: human woman finds out that she's special, entanglements with supernatural beings ensue. Dead people start being attracted to her, and need her help before they can move on. The grim reaper becomes the love interest. Other “normal” people in her life turn out to be involved with the afterlife as well . There's a bit of mystery and romance. Extra points for the heroine not being either 18 or 25 and gorgeous for once. She's 40 and quite attractive.
The reason it's 2 stars is because it ended in the middle of the story on a cliffhanger. I think that this strategy is cheating in order to get repeat readers for the next book. If the story is good enough you don't need to do that. If it hadn't done this, I would have put the next one on my tbr list. But it did, so that's me done with this series, and one star off because l'm annoyed.
I found the story formulaic and amateurish. The emotions portrayed by the main characters weren't believable. Dialogue was clunky, descriptions were clichéd.
Star crossed young lovers from families on opposite sides of a feud about a hoard of shipwrecked treasure, come back to their childhood homes 15 years later and proceed to drag out their inevitable reunion with tedious argument and misunderstanding.
The book seems to have turned ordinary recipes into green ones by simply removing the protein, or cutting it down to a very small amount. This is OK for some meals, but not as a general rule. We do need to be greener, but we also need protein. I was hoping for a cook book that showed us how to eat a properly balanced diet at the minimum cost to the environment. This wasn't the one for me.
I always include major spoilers (hidden), to help with my memory issues. Read them at your peril!
3rd in a series about a shifter/human town where local magic is getting out of control because there is a rift in the bayou which baddies have been trying to tear open. Sonya is an organiser for the magical community. Her love interest is Will, a Selkie shifter . The same evil doings are afoot, with slightly different evil doers. The baddy is easy to spot, and this one is a less fun copy of the previous two, but still enjoyable. Amanda Ronconi does an excellent job of narrating again.
One of a series. Old and new characters face challenges and mild peril, but all comes right in the end. The café comes under threat when a local criminal tries to force Holly to sell. New character Tori, has terrible relationships with both her boyfriend and family. Her story is a mix of the current time, and memories of childhood and earlier adulthood, showing the difficult times that she had. Her parents are authors and neglected her in some ways, seemingly through being self-absorbed, resulting in her being lonely and friendless . Her only childhood friendships fail when she makes a mistake, and she isn't able to get past it. As the story starts Tory and 2 of her friends are paddle boarding and are rescued by the RNLI, including Holly and Jake and they become friends.
Easy read, quite entertaining, but not especially memorable.
This story is told in a more traditional way for a vampire story, in fact I kept forgetting that it was set in the present day, and was jolted every time someone mentioned cell phones, or modern clothing. This impression is helped by the fact that the characters move about on foot, with hardly any mention of cars, trains etc. It starts slowly, and it takes the main character almost until the end of the book to realise what is going on. There is violence and sex, but much less of both than in other modern paranormal novels. The main characters are all beautiful and mostly fancy each other, but this attraction doesn't go beyond kissing for the most part. In case it bothers you, the rare sex scenes are tastefully described, with no explicit details about what was actually happening. The audio version, read by Jay Benedict, is excellent. Mr Benedict does a great job of voicing Trey's bewilderment, and manages the various accents pretty well. Nice to listen to an audio book that adds to the enjoyment of a novel.
I always include major spoilers (hidden), to help with my memory issues. Read them at your peril!
2nd in series. Amber Blackwood, her sister, and aunt are good witches. A bad witch from a cursed family wants to find a hidden spell book, which will give them great power. The chief of police now knows that Amber is a witch & trusts her. Fun listen, not memorable, narration average.
This is the best Pride and Prejudice spin-off that I have read. The P&P characters are all believably Jane Austen's, but have been developed in interesting directions, and influenced credibly by later events. The story starts before Pride and Prejudice, going on to show the events of that story from Mary's very different point of view. The bulk of this story takes place a couple of years after P&P however, when Mary is struggling to find her place. I found this mostly pretty convincing as well. If I have a criticism it is that there was eventually a bit too much romantic angst, going on for too long for my taste. But degrees of angst are a personal thing, and this may well be right up your street. If you like P&P spin-offs I highly recommend it, especially the audiobook version, read excellently by Kristen Atherton.
I always include major spoilers (hidden), to help with my memory issues. Read them at your peril!
More cosy doings in Thrush Green, a beautiful village in the Cotswolds.
The Hursts are away in America, and the people that let their house are young, rowdy and unsuitable
The vicar and his wife go away for a holiday and whilst they are gone the vicarage burns down. Eventually, Charles is given the amalgamated parishes of Thrush Green & Lulling, and the beautiful Lulling vicarage
Dotty Harmer has not been caring for herself and has a spell in the cottage hospital, followed by a stay with Winnie Bailey, and then her niece moves in with her when she returns to her cottage.
The school mistresses are planning to retire and look for a house to buy together by the sea
The miserly snobby trio of sisters are robbed of much of their silver
Albert piggot is getting too old to “care for” the church & grounds. He enjoys caring for Dotty's goat, and takes on more jobs with small animals
Molly & Ben Curdle have a daughter, name Anne after her grandmother
Very enjoyable cosy read.
This was a 5* read for a while, but tailed off a bit at the end. The title and cover design suggest that it is light chick lit for older women, about a bunch of feisty older ladies confounding the expectations of the young and prejudiced. At first, that impression seems to be wrong. The moving descriptions of Janet's desperate loneliness and failings really got to me. I thought it was going to be a much deeper read than I had expected. Then it reverted to type, and the feistiness comes to the fore. It's still very good though. A really good story, with a good range of characters, beautiful descriptions, and some tense moments. I will want to read more by this author.
I always include major spoilers (hidden), to help with my memory issues. Read them at your peril! -
Janet, 72, lives alone, has no friends at all, no family. She assumes that any friendly overtures are pity. Her one solace is her allotment, where she tends her patch of rare and medicinal plants for a strict time period everyday. Her fellow allotmenteers mostly avoid her. Then disaster strikes the council announce that Japanese knotweed has been found on the allotments, and they are declared a biohazard and are to be closed. But all is not as it seems. Janet sets out to find out who is at the root of the dastardly doings, and prove it, unexpectedly aided by her neighbour, Bev, and her ex-GCHQ colleague, Glynis.
Very quick read, almost a novella. The story rattles along, and is all about adventures and not much else, except for the spicy scenes.
I always include major spoilers (hidden), to help with my memory issues. Read them at your peril!
Nisha has been married for 20 years to an awful human being.
Sam has also been married for a long time to a lovely man, who has depression and is unemployed. Her boss is awful, her parents are critical and demanding, and she's struggling to cope.
Sam accidentally picks up Nisha's bag in the gym, forcing them to swap shoes, and things go increasingly crazy from there. Life changing stuff. Good female relationships, lots going on. It all comes together very satisfyingly in the end. Nisha's husband is a diamond smuggler unknown to her. He is a ruthless and dangerous man. Sam's husband had to constantly refuse to end his dad's life, also unknown to his wife.
Woman with excellent chef skills and ambitions to own a restaurant, with an awful mother, and trust issues, works for an unpleasant restaurant business. On a business trip into the countryside, she meets a handsome cider-making farmer, with whom she had a very brief fling in college. His family immediately love her and her cooking. The usual romance stuff ensues. It passed the time, was inoffensive and instantly forgettable.
I always include major spoilers (hidden), to help with my memory issues. Read them at your peril!
Mercy and Adam have Got married And gone away in a trailer for Their honeymoon To a campground near a river where a monster has been Tempting humans in to the river and eating them Assisted by The local 1st nation Americans, Coyote and others of his kind Mercy saves the world again. Not the best in the series, but entertaining enough.
Amelia & Emerson are persuaded by the widowed Lady Baskerville to dig at her late husband's site in Egypt. Rumours abound that a pharaoh's curse will strike anyone who enters the tomb, and indeed accidents and murders start happening. The Emerson's are followed by a keen, and impudent young journalist and a motley collection of characters from various countries.
I always include major spoilers (hidden), to help with my memory issues. Read them at your peril!
2nd in a series, but the first that I have listened to. Excellent narration. Set in Manchester, with a British dark sense of humour, and gritty reality about it, which you don't often find in fantasy stories from other countries. Stranger Times is a magazine which publishes weird stories, I think conspiracy theories and supernatural reports. As a result of whatever happened in the first book someone is out to kidnap the powerful young woman who is hiding out in the magazines offices . They are doing this by getting a plumbing company to install a new bathroom with a hidden trapdoor in the shower . Also several young men are turning into vampires overnight, with no apparent cause. People are being killed, the public is getting restive, detective Sturgeon has both his boss and a shady and powerful “Concerned Citizen” on his back. He and the Stranger Times staff need to work out what's going on and fix it.
Excellent thriller, funny, clever. Really enjoyed it.
I always include major spoilers (hidden), to help with my memory issues. Read them at your peril!
Piranesi lives in a fantastical underground world. He doesn't know that he has forgotten what has happened to him in the past. He trusts the only other person that enters his world, and he shouldn't. The story is strikingly original and beautifully written. The end of the story is a bit of a let down as he escapes into the real world above ground .