Book 61-65
Book 61: C.E. Murphy, Urban Shaman, Book 1 of the Walker Papers series. Paranormal. 5 stars.
Comic threads intertwine with the darker ones, making this an enjoyable read. Joanne's insistance on walking away from her heritage and being "just a mechanic" bite her in the butt as she goes on a wild chase to rescue a woman she saw chased from the window of an airplane. Despite being a graduate of the police academy, she's always worked in the motor pool, and her adventures in finding a supernatural serial killer bring her out of the shop and into actual police work. I liked her sidekick being an older fellow, without being the tired old handsome supporting male character. The resolution of healing versus killing was also an important change from most paranormal series. Definately a series to keep watching.
Book 62: Charlaine Harris, Grave Sight, Book 1 of the Harper Connelly series. Paranormal mystery. 3 stars.
Harris' novels tend to be too short to really delve into character development, needing the breadth of a series to really bring characters to life, but she did a better job in this series intro novel than usual. Harper's background is detailed enough to understand her character flaws and strengths, although her brother Tolliver's rather one-dimensional as the big protector bodyguard type. The fact that her talent of finding dead bodies results from surviving a lightning strike rather than some magical means is a strong plus in making the series unique. However, the murder mystery that was the plotline of the novel was so transparent, I'd figured it out long before the story ended. Hopefully that aspect will improve with series development.
Book 63: Marianne de Pierres, Code Noir, Book 2 of the Parrish Plessis series. Cyberpunk. 4 stars.
The series continues its darkly cyberpunk nature as Parrish discovers being a warlord isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially when she owes blood debt to the local Cabal. Leaving her ex-lover in charge of her territory, she goes deep into the dark heart of The Tert to find kidnapped shamans. Her inability to pass by an underdog continues as she collects an injured canrat, a python, and some more feral kids who've fallen victim to genetic experimenting. I saw a review of this series that called it Mad Max meets Dark Angel and I have to agree - but it's an enjoyable combination if you like dark, gritty, bloody cyberpunk.
Book 64: Simon R. Green, Agents of Light and Darkness, Book 2 of the Nightside series. Dark fantasy. 4 stars.
John Taylor continues to use his talent for finding things, this time the Unholy Grail, the cup that Judas Iscariot drank from at the Last Supper. Various forces are tearing the Nightside apart to find it, so John joins forces with Suzie Shooter to chase leads that frequently turn up dead (literally) before they get there. While there wasn't a lot of revelation about John's character or his search for who/what his mother really is, there is a huge revelation of Suzie's background that explains quite a bit about her character and makes her much more interesting than just John's gun-happy sidekick. A good read, but far too short as the Nightside series books all seem to be.
Book 65: Paul Preuss, Breaking Strain - Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime Volume 1. Sci-fi. 2 stars.
If I understood the author's notes correctly, Preuss originally started adapting a novella of Clarke's called "Breaking Strain" to be an RPG. The game didn't pan out, so he was encouraged to reroute everything to be a novel series instead. The ideas behind it - a girl altered cybernetically for a secret government agency, then having her memory wiped for whatever dark reasons - has been done to death in recent years, but obviously Clarke's idea predates most of them ("Breaking Strain" was published in 1949). The book would have been more enjoyable had Preuss stayed primarily in Sparta's head, but his POV-hopping made the mystery less interesting and garbled the flow of the book. This may have been written in pieces instead of as a coherent whole, and as the later tales were supposed to be written as books (not intended as games or adapted from short stories), then hopefully they'll have a better flow.
Currently Reading: Windfall, Book 4 of the Weather Wardens series by Rachel Caine. Up Next: Son of Avonar, Book 1 of the Bridge of D'Arnath series by Carol Berg.