CLYDE WISHAM
As [b:Black Cherry Blues 16136444 Black Cherry Blues (Dave Robicheaux, #3) James Lee Burke https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1352381867s/16136444.jpg 1509542] opens, Dave Robicheaux is trying to put his life back together. He is fighting the desire for alcohol and the depression resulting from his wife's recent death. All he wants to do is run his small business and rear his adopted daughter. But, a chance meeting with an old friend lands him in deep trouble.Accused of murder, he has to leave his native Louisiana and head into the big sky country of Montana to try and prove his innocence. There the plot thickens as Robicheaux has to deal with Mafia thugs, cold blooded murderers, local Native American problems, big oil interests, and a tough DEA agent. Nothing is simple and everything is dangerous.As usual with Burke, the writing is brilliant. His prose is rich and lyrical, the characters are well drawn, and he describes scenes much more vividly than most authors. I listened to the audio version, and Mark Hammer's narration was very good indeed.Good crime fiction.
As [b:In Plain Sight 31868501 In Plain Sight (Joe Pickett, #6) C.J. Box https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1473277469s/31868501.jpg 898058] opens, Joe Pickett is struggling to do his job as a game warden while being plagued by a vindictive supervisor who is determined to see him fail. Then Opal Scarlett, the matriarch of the wealthy and powerful Scarlett family, goes missing. As game warden, Joe should have only a peripheral interest in the case, but events pull him into the investigation and the resulting family feud. And then there is J.W. Keeley, a psycho killer who has decided to hurt Joe Pickett in the worst way possible. C.J. Box melds these elements to produce a good crime-thriller.This is a well written story with an exciting and strong finish (with a typical C.J. Box twist). I particularly liked how many small seemingly unimportant details become crucial plot details as the story moves toward the climax.This story can be read stand-alone, but I recommend reading the earlier books in the series first.
ACtA is set several hundred years before the Honor Harrington series. It is not a safe time. Shadowy and powerful forces have decided that the Manticore binary system has great value and plan to take it over by force. The chronically underfunded and understaffed Manticore space navy will find itself with its back to the wall and in a fight to the death.
Good military SF with a lot of intrigue and some interesting characters.
This is a real genre crosser. We get WW2 bomber operations and aerial combat over Germany. We get travel to alternate worlds. We get lots of action in which the heroes have to survive and overcome impossible odds again and again. We get some really really bad enemies. We even get some romance and a bit of humor.
Basically Fata Morgana is a good story well told and with a very nice ending. It was slightly spoiled for me by a real deus ex machina moment late in the book in which a geeky crewman saves them by taking control of some super advanced technology with no explanation at all as to how he did it.
In the sixth entry in the series, Maisie must deal with the lingering effects of WW1 trauma. After narrowly escaping death herself when a despondent war cripple commits suicide, she becomes an adviser to Scotland Yard Special Branch.
The main story is about a wounded (emotionally and physically) WWI veteran who is threatening to release poison gas in London. First he poisons animals, then targets members of the government, and finally threatens the general public. With a New Year's Eve deadline, a pulse-pounding manhunt is on. Though Maisie prefers to work alone, she must coordinate with Special Branch and also deal with a shadowy government agency that seems to dog her every step.
There are sub-plots also. Maisie's assistant, her best friend, and even Maisie herself must also deal with their own lingering traumas. Winspear deftly meshes these elements with the main plot.
Pretty good book. One of the best in the series to this point.
Devotion tells a very compelling true story. In fact, the book actually tells two stories. The first is the story of two unlikely friends – Naval aviators Lieutenant Tom Hudner, winner of the Medal of Honor, and Ensign Jesse Brown, the Navy's first black aircraft carrier pilot. We learn of their origins – Tom Hudner a son of white privilege from the North East and Jesse Brown a son of the poorest of poor Mississippi share-croppers. Then we learn how they became fighter pilots, how they became friends, and how together they learned the harsh realities of war. The second story tells of the hardships and bitter fighting endured by some young marines who were among those cut off and surrounded by the Chinese army during the harsh North Korean winter of 1950. The two stories touch on each other at several points – the key one being when the aviators provide close air support for the imperiled marines. They are stories of true courage, friendship, heroism, and sacrifice.
A well-written book about events that few know about nowadays, and a good read for military history buffs. A solid four stars.
It seems Nora Roberts decided to write a post-apocalyptic paranormal fantasy. And, she did a pretty damn good job of it. This is a pretty dark book. There is death, lots of death. And there is dark evil. Of course there is also hope (otherwise it wouldn't be much of a story) and there are some good and courageous characters. This appears to be the beginning of a series. I expect I will continue with it.
Another good book in the Maisie Dobbs series.
In this one, Maisie has put her old team together and reestablished herself as a PI in London. One of her former colleagues, Francesca Thomas, hires Maisie to investigate the death of a Belgian refugee who came to Britain as a teenager during World War I. As Maisie investigates, she finds that more Belgian's who settled in England at that time are being murdered. She appears to be on the trail of a serial killer. She knows that Francesca is involved in intelligence work and begins to suspect that she hasn't been given the full story. Complications and danger issue.
Additionally, the start of WW2 gives Maisie more personal complications and problems involving her staff, family, and friends. She has a lot of balls to juggle.
Good, solid story in the series. The narration by Orlagh Cassidy is quite good.
4+ stars.
Russell Blake gives us a fast-moving hunt for ancient Inca treasure. We get lots of action, a little romance, some really bad bad guys, and multiple plot twists. What's not to like?
I enjoyed the story, but it didn't really pull me in. I just wasn't in the mood for an action-thriller perhaps. I will, however, give Blake another go sometime.
3+ stars.
This series keeps getting better.
We get plenty of action. There are space battles and ground conflicts using lots of cool futuristic weapons and equipment. Dirty dealing and do-or-die moments abound. Also, the special operative that showed up at the end of book two returns to make good on his promise. Things have seriously heated up.
The characters are well realized, especially the four POV characters. Their separate threads are starting to converge now. And, though his motivation remains unclear, I think I spotted the character who is trying to destabilize things and restart the war (of course that might be a red herring).
I would like a little more on how humans came to settle this system with its multiple habitable planets. (They don't seem to have FTL.) Perhaps we will learn more in a later book.
4+ stars
[b:The Heights of Courage: A Tank Leader's War on the Golan 34657 The Heights of Courage A Tank Leader's War on the Golan Avigdor Kahalani https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347770997s/34657.jpg 34628] is one of the best books around about tank warfare. Avigdor Kahalani was the commander of a battalion of Israeli Centurions during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. That war was basically a tank war, and it was fought under very adverse conditions. Kahalani and his men were in the thick of the action all the way. It is a compelling true story.
In Other Rhodes Sarah Hoyt gives us an adventure melding far future space opera and 1930's style gumshoe mystery.
The story is set in a far future interstellar civilization with spaceships, cyborgs, rapid communications, and very advanced VR. In that setting the MC finds herself in desperate circumstances in which she must solve multiple mysteries involving some nasty criminal organizations, murder, and missing persons.
This story pushed my WSoD right to the limit a few times. However, Ms. Hoyt managed to pull everything together nicely in the end.
Good, quick read. 3.5 stars rounded up.
IMHO, this is the best of the Kate Shugak novels to this point.
This time Kate takes on a job guiding a group of German hunters going after Alaskan big game. Suffice to say things do not go as planned; in fact, they go very badly indeed.
I reckon it took a lot of courage for Dana Stabenow to write the heart-rending conclusion. Can Kate recover from the emotional damage? Never completely, I suspect.
4.5 stars rounded up.
For this book Louis L'Amour obviously did a lot of research into 19th century hard-rock mining and in particular into the early development of the famous Comstock silver ore lode. Of course, being Louis L'Amour he seamlessly inserts that info into a damned good story about revenge, honor, and steadfastness in the face of great difficulty and danger.
Overall, quite a good novel – in the parlance of the old hard-rock miners, “deep enough”.
Five Decembers is quite a good if rather odd crime novel. Joe McGrady, a Honolulu police detective, starts investigating a brutal dual murder in December of 1941 just before the start of WW2. His investigation takes him West to Hong Kong. There the events of the war take him in an unexpected direction and put his investigation on hold during the war. After the war in 1945 he resumes his investigation and takes it to a conclusion five Decembers later.
That makes the story sound simple. It is anything but. We get a complicated mystery involving more than just the murders and requiring tenacious police work. We get violence, brutality, betrayal, do-or-die situations, and unexpected romance.
For me one of the key aspects of the story is Kestrel's attention to detail. That and Edoardo Ballerini's excellent narration made me feel like I was back in the early 1940s in Hawaii and the Far East during those terrible times.
Solid 4 stars.
This is a genera busting book. It has fantasy + space opera + military SF + romance. Not bad at all. Cover sucks, though – like something out of a 15-year-old's wet dream.
This big book is ambitious, even epic. Mayer populates this novel with both fictional and historical characters to weave a story that starts at West Point in 1841 and ends at the first bloody day of the Battle of Shiloh. The four main POV characters range far and wide and they witness most of the big events that shaped the U.S. during those fateful years—Frémont's expeditions, the Mexican-American war, the founding of the Naval Academy, the hanging of John Brown, the attack on Fort Sumpter, and the battles that studded the first year of the Civil War. However, this isn't a dry book about events. Loves, hopes, victories, and defeats bring the characters and their families to life. Damned good book.
I finally got around to reading Sun of Suns, which had been setting in my to-read ebook stack for two years. I should have done so sooner as it was a very enjoyable read. The good news for me is that this is the first book in the Virga series, which is up to five books now.
Imagine Horatio Hornblower in a weightless environment and you will have some idea of what this story is like.
Highly recommended for SF and action fans.
Floating Worlds is Cecelia Holland's only SF novel. It is a good one, but I think she found there is more money in historical novels and fantasy.