Read Recently -- September -- The Books That Don't Fit In Any Other Catagory
The Professional by Robert B. Parker
Spenser is approached by a lawyer representing a quartet of women who are being blackmailed. It seems that each of them has had an affair (with the same man!), a quiet fling alongside their rich husband(s), and now their flingee is demanding money or he will tell their husbands. Spenser manages to track the guy down (no mean feat--this guy is good at hiding) but can't convince him to give up the project. Furthermore, it seems that some of the women aren't quite ready to give the guy up. Throw in an angry husband with a few shady connections and Spenser has his hands full, and that's before people start dying.
A decent enough story, though not much of a mystery, when you get down to it. Spenser and Susan are still heavily into judging the non-monogamous, though this time Spenser stands up for people's right to love how they can (he just doesn't seem to believe that they can, if you get me). Parker apparently has four posthumous novels coming out; I hope at least one of them has Spenser dealing with a case that has nothing to do with sex.
Mildly recommended.
The Dragon and the Stars edited by Derwin Mak and Eric Choi
The back cover describes this as a "unique anthology of science fiction and fantasy tales [featuring] stories by authors of Chinese ancestry", and that is mostly inarguably true. It is a unique anthology, and it is by authors of Chinese ancestry, but some of them don't seem to actually be SF or F. I mean, stories in which Asians run the first space-traveling mail service, or in which young men living in an Asian-dominated North America visit the stereotyped "Anglotown" looking for ethnic food (to choose two in which really spoke to me) are unquestionably SF, but a story in which an older woman freaks out because she keeps getting blank fortune cookies and thinks she's going to die, or two others which seem to be setting up parallel universes but then cancel out the differences completely baffled me.
Mind you, every story in here is excellent, and look at the world through cultures that most of us White North Americans rarely see, so the book itself is highly recommended. My minor concerns about genre purity shouldn't discourage you from reading it.
Spenser is approached by a lawyer representing a quartet of women who are being blackmailed. It seems that each of them has had an affair (with the same man!), a quiet fling alongside their rich husband(s), and now their flingee is demanding money or he will tell their husbands. Spenser manages to track the guy down (no mean feat--this guy is good at hiding) but can't convince him to give up the project. Furthermore, it seems that some of the women aren't quite ready to give the guy up. Throw in an angry husband with a few shady connections and Spenser has his hands full, and that's before people start dying.
A decent enough story, though not much of a mystery, when you get down to it. Spenser and Susan are still heavily into judging the non-monogamous, though this time Spenser stands up for people's right to love how they can (he just doesn't seem to believe that they can, if you get me). Parker apparently has four posthumous novels coming out; I hope at least one of them has Spenser dealing with a case that has nothing to do with sex.
Mildly recommended.
The Dragon and the Stars edited by Derwin Mak and Eric Choi
The back cover describes this as a "unique anthology of science fiction and fantasy tales [featuring] stories by authors of Chinese ancestry", and that is mostly inarguably true. It is a unique anthology, and it is by authors of Chinese ancestry, but some of them don't seem to actually be SF or F. I mean, stories in which Asians run the first space-traveling mail service, or in which young men living in an Asian-dominated North America visit the stereotyped "Anglotown" looking for ethnic food (to choose two in which really spoke to me) are unquestionably SF, but a story in which an older woman freaks out because she keeps getting blank fortune cookies and thinks she's going to die, or two others which seem to be setting up parallel universes but then cancel out the differences completely baffled me.
Mind you, every story in here is excellent, and look at the world through cultures that most of us White North Americans rarely see, so the book itself is highly recommended. My minor concerns about genre purity shouldn't discourage you from reading it.