After finding Lisbeth Salander shot in the head and near death in her father’s farmhouse, Mikael Blomkvist is even more determined to bring her father and his accomplices; an inner circle of men he’s named The Zalachenko Group, who have been involved in 35 year conspiracy, to justice. As his tunnel vision consumes him, leading him to dark and dangerous places, he uncovers information that could not only exonerate Lisbeth, but bring down one of the biggest and most trusted government agencies in history.

Lisbeth lies in critical condition at a Swedish hospital. She’s fighting for her life, knowing that when she recovers she’s to be transferred to prison to await her trial for a triple homicide. As she tries to focus on healing, she soon learns that her father is not only alive, but a hall’s length away and secretly coming to her room at night.

Meanwhile Erika Berger has defected from Millenium to SMP, the largest newspaper in Sweden. Unable to untangle herself from the Blomkvist and the Zalachenko affair, she nevertheless tries hard to steer the reins and bring a floundering paper into the black. But she meets resistance at every turn, a resistance that could lead to her horrifying death.

I was insanely excited to get right into the meat of this book, as the first two of the trilogy consumed and entertained me to no end. But as I started reading I soon realized that the third book of this, dare-I-say phenomena, and the last in Larsson’s career, wasn’t of the same caliber as the other two.
Don’t get me wrong, it is a must read for fans of the trilogy. It ties up loose ends nicely and has some heart pounding scenes that will be talked about for years to come. But there’s a certain slow-as-molasses pace in the beginning that makes you put the book down and not want to return to it for a long time.

Berger, who is merely a secondary character and sexual distraction for Blomkvist in the first two books, now has a primary storyline that, to me seemed completely unnecessary as it did nothing to move the main storyline forward. But as a standalone story, it’s a thrilling mystery that shocked and entertained.

But to fast forward through all the poorly edited and needless plot points (you can tell that due to Larsson’s death the proper editing was left to amateurs), there’s a shining star in this book, which is the part I referred to before, as what will be talked about for years to come; the behind-closed-door Salander trial.
Giannini, Lisbeth’s lawyer, is barely a secondary character, not only in this book but the series at large. However in the end Larsson has her come crashing forward with a spine-tingling, nail-biting cross examination, with a feverishly emotional dialogue that will most probably mark a precedent for future courtroom dialogue in thriller novels.

This is the highlight of the book and the reason why I’m sad that I won’t be able to indulge in Larsson’s creativity again.

When Logan Thibault (thigh-bolt) finds the photograph of a mysterious woman in the sand while on tour in Iraq, he thinks nothing of it. However, after escaping almost certain death multiple times, the photograph begins to take on a new meaning, eventually being referred to as his ‘lucky charm’ by the other soldiers.

After finishing his tour of duty, Logan sets about to discover the woman in the photograph when he’s told by his friend and fellow Veteran, Victor, that he ‘owes her for keeping him safe’.

When I first read Nicolas Sparks’ THE NOTEBOOK I was taken by how well he could tell a story without interrupting the reader. While the movie didn’t do the book justice (in my opinion) it did open a world of opportunity for Nicolas and his excellent writing skills. 15 books later, he’s still at it and his latest, THE LUCKY ONE, will be sure to please his fans—I think.

For me, I was left with a feeling of disappointment. Nicolas does so well in The Lucky One building tension between Logan, Beth and Clayton that when the tension (a character almost in itself) finally comes to the front between the three I was expecting great things. Instead, what I got was a rushed ending that tries to tie everything up in three (short) chapters that it spent the first 350+ pages leading up to. A major disappointment given how great everything was that lead up to it. My first thought after closing the book was: Really?

FINAL VERDICT

If you’re a Sparks fan then you’re going to read this. I liked everything up until the rushed ending and I suspect anyone who reads this will feel the same. It’s far from a waste of time; just don’t expect a lot in the end.

Another week and another Zombie book seems to be out there. Have we reached walking dead saturation point yet, it doesn’t seem so.

So what does Joe McKinney give us?

The Texas Gulf Coast is hit by hurricane after hurricane and out of the devastation the dead rise and the plague spreads and San Antonio cop Eddie Hudson has the fight of his life to keep alive and try and find his missing wife and baby son.

There is nothing new in plot or premise, but what we do get in spades is fast paced action: gun shooting, brain exploding relentless the dead alive and eating flesh action. The pages fly by in your hands as our cop hero gets into scrape after terrifying scrape, stopping at nothing to get back to his loved ones.

I rather enjoyed the ride with him.

Verdict:

Day of the Dead meets Die Hard.....

The entertainment industry has been overrun with zombies, a veritable undead tidal wave flooding everything from movies, to television, to video games, and, yes, literature. Particularly literature. Bookshelves are buckling under the weight of apocalyptic horrors focused on the walking dead, the running dead, or just really angry people who want us dead.

This is not a complaint, necessarily. I love the zombie sub-genre, however I nurse a growing concern that the glut of flesh eating stories will ultimately warrant a backlash that could force the sub-genre underground, or worse, into becoming a self-parody. And let’s be honest with ourselves, there is a lot of garbage out there produced by people who simply view zombies as an opportunity to cash in on the craze.

I hate to say this, but I think I just need a vacation from the whole zombie thing.

Because of this, I initially balked at reading Amelia Beamer’s surprisingly fun debut novel The Loving Dead. To my discredit, the book sat face down on my desk for at least a month, Beamer’s spectacled eyes framed in golden dreadlocks on the back cover, willing me to partake of its bloodied contents. I finally relented, based solely on the notion that an author with such a kick ass hairstyle wouldn’t dare steer me wrong.

“People like to predict the death of genres or sub-genres, but I like to see it from the other end,” Beamer explains of her initial foray into the scene while addressing fears about the state of the subject matter. “Zombies are everywhere: that means that everyone is familiar with them. What matters are the stories we can tell using this tool. Since everyone knows what zombies are, we can really play with the material.”

The Loving Dead may be the world’s first hipster zombie tale with its cast of young, ironic, culturally savvy characters (“I'd like to think that my friends would get along with them”) who probably spend a considerable amount of time reading cooler-than-thou websites like Pitchfork.com. The story follows Kate and Michael, two friends struggling not only to come to terms with who they are, but what they mean to each other as a slow-burn zombie apocalypse descends upon San Francisco. “My characters work at Trader Joe's; they have real people problems and joys,” she says. “All of my characters come out of me and the people I've met.”

Beamer, whose day job involves editing the science fiction magazine Locus (“It's a great job for a writer”), effectively transcends the typical survivalist end of days tropes of zombie fiction by focusing on the relationships and interactions of the characters. “I spent the few years before I wrote The Loving Dead mostly working on literary fiction, the kind where two people meet and discuss their failed relationship,” she explains. “Nothing happens in them! And the trick is to make somebody feel something, but there isn't a massive readership for this kind of fiction outside of The New Yorker. So I figured, throw some zombies in, and bam, we'll have a plot! Readers like plot.”

“Ultimately, plot and character are the same thing,” Beamer continues. “Plot is what happens to characters, and characters exist only in relation to what's happening to them. If I'd forgotten to put in the zombies, my characters would still have problems figuring out whether they're dating the right person: the zombies just make survival a big concern, too.”

More akin to Shaun of the Dead than the grim nihilism of most zombie fare, The Loving Dead is often genuinely funny amidst the horrific violence and destruction that surrounds the protagonists. “Humor and horror are very closely related,” the author points out. “Horror, as a genre, is when we see a tragedy unfolding and we identify enough with the people involved that we don't laugh at them. And at the same time, people make terribly dark jokes about the things that scare us. We have to in order to stay sane.”

Stylish and clever, although slightly uneven at times, The Loving Dead provides an original take on the zombie sub-genre (infection as STD), with enough requisite carnage and relational missteps to appeal to a wider reading audience. Beamer has succeeded in adding a fresh voice to undead fiction, and will be returning in September with her contribution to The Living Dead 2 anthology entitled Pirates vs. Zombies.

Thanks to Beamer, I’ll be rethinking that vacation.

As a kid growing up in central Ohio, the weekends were a very distinctive time for me. There was no school obviously, but Fridays and Saturdays throughout my childhood also provided a specifically unique education. With horror host instructors such as Big Chuck and Little John on channel 8, Super Host on channel 43, and the Ghoul on channel 61, I was emotionally raptured into an otherworld filled with monsters from the farthest reaches of space and beyond. Others could have their football games and Wide World of Sports; I was more concerned with blithely living in a universe filled with giant lizards, Ro-Men, She-Creatures, and horrors on various party beaches.

Perhaps this nostalgic affinity for classic horror and science fiction fare has unduly influenced my enthusiastic opinion of Larry Doyle’s novel Go, Mutants!, a delightfully brilliant masterpiece that successfully pays homage to classic creature features and space operas, while brutally skewering both high school and national politics (let’s face it, sometimes there’s no difference) with equal wit and genius.

Set in an alternate history where both iconic and obscure 1950’s & 60’s genre aliens and beasties have been integrated into society, Go, Mutants! tells the story of an alien teenage outcast, J!m, looking for his place in life. More akin to Exeter from This Island Earth, J!m hangs out with a green motorcycle riding ape and a love hungry glob of goo named Jelly while pining after Marie, the earth girl of his dreams.

"After the success of the book I Love You, Beth Cooper, the publisher wanted to know what else I had,” author Larry Doyle recalls. “Go, Mutants! was it. It was a notion I had been kicking around for a few years, but hadn't figured out a thematic underpinning until the events of the past few years, when I realized that politically and socially, we were reliving the fifties. That gave me a reason, and excuse, for using all these cool aliens and mutants in a story.”

“I wanted to show them living on the periphery of society, objects of derision but also fear and desire,” Doyle says. “And I wanted to do it without being as obvious as what I just said.”

Troubled by his bewildering passion for the human Marie (not to mention the merciless bullying he experiences daily at school), J!m must deal with his Rebel Without a Clue-ish high school existential funk while simultaneously coming to terms with an unwanted legacy as the son of Andy, a brilliant, British accented alien allegedly killed during his diabolical pursuit of world domination. “The aliens and mutants represent the Other, in the way that Communists, blacks, Muslims and now illegal aliens do in our society,” explains Doyle. “The events of 9/11 propelled us back into a Cold War mentality, only with radical Islam replacing Communism as a boogieman, with all the attendant hysteria, witch hunts and loyalty tests. As in the fifties, it’s not that no threat exists; it’s that our reaction to the threat probably does more damage to our underlying principles than the threat realistically poses.”

Avoiding the numerous literary pitfalls that such politically metaphoric material can present, Doyle, a former writer for The Simpsons, spins a frenetic sophomore effort that deftly avoids heavy handed proselytizing in exchange for wicked smart dialogue, colorfully rendered characters, and a world that many of us have fantasized about since adolescence.

Fortunately for those of us who look fondly upon the days of wild eyed mad scientists, stop motion beasts from the deep, and radiation giving life to, well, just about anything, Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment has purchased the rights to Go, Mutants! “I just handed in the second draft of the screenplay,” Doyle reports. “A lot can happen between that and a movie coming out, including a movie never coming out. It will depend, to a certain extent, on how well the book does. So please buy 10,000 copies.”

I bought mine…

It seems sadly that Leisure Fiction part of Dorchester Publishing is only going over to mainly publishing ebooks with only a few going on to get trade paperback releases.

Sounds mad to me and they have lost not only my custom, but Brian Keene, will no longer be releashing any of his next batch of planned book releases through them.

The Time Raiders Project is at a crisis point in their quest to find all the pieces of the key that will keep
peace in the world. In order to achieve their cause they recruit Alexandra Patton, a psychic for this secret military agency. Her mission is critical, to go back to 60 AD Briton and retrieve the missing pieces of a war Queen’s medallion, or the world as they know it today could end.

Once there, disguised as a Goddess, Alex finds herself face to face with dangers that she could have never have fathomed. She meets a sexy Druid warrior named Caradoc who teaches her how to harness her paranormal talents in order to accomplish her mission. What she doesn’t expect is to fall in love. Torn now, she must decide if a new beginning in a strange and fantastic time is where she really wants to be, and can she decide before her mission is aborted and she must return to her own world.

I’ve heard a lot about PC Cast over the last few years, her House of Night series, being a huge success. So when I was asked to read her new venture with Mills & Boon’s Nocturne series, of course I was game. The story was fresh and well researched; it kept me moving through the pages. And the juicy sex scenes definitely set your loins on fire. I was; however, slightly disappointed with the way to story felt rushed, with no real description for all these supposed mystical lands and war-like characters. I didn’t feel like I was there with the characters, experiencing going back in time. Which is really why we read fantasy, no?
It seemed like a painter merely drawing the outline of a great painting, but never taking the time to fill it in with scene or color.
It is, however, a good background story for Marked, where the original Dark Daughters appear in her House of Night series.

I read this while on holiday and was taken by the mix of myth, legend and different slant on the Robin Hood tale of old. The author puts a real fantasy spin on the old legends and gives an ending bordering on the religious.

If you like the legends of Robin Hood and have been bored with recent incarnations, give this book a try. You will not read another book like this with Little John and Tuck and Marion given very different roles and personas than we are normally used too.

Written with elegance and bewitching the reader to their core.
This was obviously a labour of love.


See link to order:

http://www.robinofthewood.com/order.php

Finally Detective D.D Warren has managed to fit a date into her job obsessed life. But as she’s only thinking of one thing, and wondering how fast she can get there, she’s summoned to a brutal crime scene where evidence points to a man killing his entire family, and then himself. Only it’s not a simple as it seems. The suspect has thrown in a monkey wrench and killed each victim with a different MO. Something that Warren has never encountered before. As she digs her heels into the case, not 48 hours later tragedy strikes again, as another family is killed in nearly the exact fashion.

Danielle loves her job on the pediatric psych ward, and she’s good at it. Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps her from going crazy. But as the anniversary of her family’s brutal killing creeps closer, she’s finding it harder than ever to hang on to her sanity. She can’t seem to stop replaying that night in her mind’s eye, causing her to falter at her job, something she can’t afford to do or children die. Just when she thinks she can’t handle anything else, there are the two mass murders that eerily hit too close to home and send the police calling.

Victoria is just trying to stay alive. But it’s hard when every time she turns around, her eight year old son is trying to kill her. But what she doesn’t know is that the day he puts her in the hospital, is the day that reveals her son might be the missing link the police need to bring a mass killer to light.

The more I read Gardner’s D.D Warren series, the more I wonder why she’s the fixture of a series in the first place. Warren is not well developed. In this fourth installment, all we seem to know is that she’s a workaholic detective that puts job first and everything else last. Live to Tell is told through the eyes of three different women, our heroine, Danielle and Victoria, where it jumps from each’s perspective, loads up suspects at a whim and teases at the heat that could flare between some of the characters. The plot is good, you never get lost and you’re kept guessing. It’s definitely one of Gardner’s better books, her passion for the story clearly present, and perhaps the hard-to-take subject matter (especially if you’re a parent) might make this her best yet.

I keep wondering however, will we ever get to what makes Warren tick?

Say what you will about Brian Keene, but the man has made an impact in horror fiction. Since his Bram Stoker award winning debut novel The Rising landed on bookshelves in 2004 (credited by no less than the New York times as instrumental in kicking off the zombie craze), Keene has attained a dark prose Grand Poobah status in the eyes of genre fans around the globe. With no less than eleven novels since The Rising, assorted short stories, comic book gigs, and a free ongoing serial published through his website, Keene is practically a one-man publishing industry.

Unfortunately for Keene’s latest, A Gathering of Crows has proven to be sparse and unimaginative, devoid of any tangible characterization or depth. And while layered nuance may not be what horror fans want out of the author, I can’t imagine that a bland narrative overrun with wooden dialogue is high on the list either.

Set in a small town in West Virginia, A Gathering of Crows brings back Levi Stozfus, an ex-Amish Hebraic witch featured in Keene’s book Ghost Walk. On his way to Virginia and stopping only for the night in Brinkley Springs, Levi inconveniently finds himself trapped within the borders of the forgettable hamlet as five demonic entities lay siege to the citizenry, ripping apart anyone and everyone they find.

A Gathering of Crows’ whisper thin plot seems more like an appendix for Keene’s burgeoning Labyrinth universe than a stand-alone novel. Filled with alternate earth timelines under attack by The Thirteen (evil forces sworn to destroy God’s creation), the Labyrinth is the Lovecraftian mythos Keene has constructed connecting his various books and the assorted cosmic horrors within. The inter-dimensional conflicts continually spill over into physical reality, unleashing zombies, giant worms, ghouls, and now soul-consuming revenants manifested in a murder of crows.

While I am not one to necessarily share advice with bestselling authors (and let’s face it, a book like A Gathering of Crows is red meat to his ravenous readers), Keene could potentially profit more from abbreviating his enormous literary output and focusing on developing stories that operate on more than the primal nihilistic levels that he has explored ad infinitum. The notion that these cataclysmic events are happening simply due to vengeful antics of The Thirteen creates a redundancy of back-story that grows tiresome novel after novel. While Lovecraft was able to loosely connect his pantheon of dark tales with the backbone of the celebrated Cthulhu Mythos, it must be noted that the legendary writer’s body of work manifested primarily in the short form and, in all honesty, should not credibly be compared with Keene’s (even though I just did).

With regard to A Gathering of Crows, those who like this sort of thing will find this to be the sort of thing they like. Keene is somewhat of a name brand in the horror market, making him to some extent review proof. Ultimately, his fans will read him no matter what, and Leisure Fiction will continue to pump out his material. His next book, Entombed, already scheduled to drop in February, is a return to Keene’s zombie wheelhouse, and hopefully a homecoming for the sheer narrative velocity and character development of The Rising.