Adam

TW: Rape/Non-Con

I feel like I just wrote a review talking about exactly the topic of Consent. What is it with publishers commissioning and putting out this trash? I walked into this 100% knowing this was flat out hentai. It's got adult warnings on it, it's published in the US by the Adult arm of Seven Seas... so yeah, no one should be shocked this is porn. However, I just have one question... is it too much to ask to get some consent with my porn?

Reading the synopsis on the back you'd think this would run, essentially, like a nice Shojo manga, but with the characters going all the way. Oh boy, that is NOT what we got. One of the things I rather appreciated about Seven Seas taking on publishing this content is because it wasn't necessarily going to be a sex scene per chapter and, here's what I'm after, character development!! Yes, you heard me, I want character development with my smut. From the back of this you would think this is a child hood friend turned lovers story... but it doesn't play out that way and it, honestly, feels like the writer was meeting a quota of including a sex scene PER chapter. So, it feels more like that generalized short story hentai that requires that kind of stuff. Rather than volumes of characters developing their relationship. Another boon I was hoping for in this manga was that it had actual adults in it! I was pretty pumped to leave the high school concepts behind for a while. Yeah, I know the high school story line is popular and they basically get around the “they're just kids” by basically drawing everyone to be 30, except the obligatory loli character (shudder). But here comes this story of adult professionals! I was definitely into the idea even though the “sexy fireman” narrative doesn't do anything in my world.

Ok, so what exactly goes down. The two characters are actually childhood friends and one day the fireman character saves his friend from a fire and brings her back to his place. This could have been a good setup... except for one problem. She turns him down for sex. In fact, it happens multiple times and he ignores her. At this point I have no idea who would find this erotic. What really needs to be crushed is this stupid narrative of “when a girl says no, she might really mean yes”... like stop it with that trash. It wasn't cool in the old days it's certainly not cool now. I feel like, what it does is create some bizarre narrative in a rapists head of “yeah, but she really wanted it.” Yeah... no...

I was extremely uncomfortable reading this and I can only imagine it being way worse for a woman. Instead this manga reads like a terrifying warning list for women in general. You know that childhood friend you grew up with? Yeah, it doesn't matter how well you know each other, he'll still rape you if he wants. You know that professional rescuer that saved your life? Yeah, he might rape you too. That guy that brought you to the festival and bought you all kinds of fun things? Yup, he might rape you when he gets you alone.

This whole narrative about the woman's body responding to forced sexual interaction needs to stop and stop hard. When people talk about things perpetuating “rape culture” this volume is a totally solid warning. It's not even that hard to turn this narrative around either... when Souma saves Ryo's life and brings her back to his apartment have her see him in a totally different light and consent! You know what makes sex way more awesome... having BOTH parties mutually want it! They could create conflict in different ways, like her being unsure if she really can build a relationship beyond sex with the guy (but, yeesh, have her be into having the sex)... or just something else that puts them on the path of building a relationship TOGETHER.

The art in this is pretty solid and on that front it had a lot of great points. But the story content is just not good... hard pass on this and I'll not be following it to volume 2.

CW/TW: Rape

The way this manga is described and marketed is as a sexy comedy and yes, that is exactly what it tries to be except for one major missed detail... consent. Ah yes, I'm about to ruin all the fun sexy times with a whole detailed discussion about consent. Buckle up.

This story is about a high school student who, for whatever reason, is chosen to be the one who needs to help bear the next savior of the world. He's not the savior, but his child is supposed to be, so a litany of women are now asked to mate with him so that whatever powers that be can figure out who will be the most powerful offspring. The world setup is actually somewhat interesting, kind of playing off the Monster Manga that is getting quite popular today. This is sort of a modern fantasy setting of “what if all those fantasy worlds with elves, dwarves, etc. continued to modernize out of medieval times” and just wound up here in modern times with all the races existing alongside regular humans. So, at first I was kind of down to read this, it seemed like it would be an interesting world. It is made pretty clear at the beginning that our character has the hots for this elf girl who sits next to him in class, but he's too nervous/shy to talk to her or make any meaningful moves. Let me be clear that his being a minor isn't exactly my biggest issue here, in fact teens exercising and showing consent is probably one of THE most important things.

Now the setup seemed rather promising at this point and our main character is rather plain as they often are in these kind of manga. They even give him the additional problem that if he gets too aroused around real women then he passes out. Again, not an issue for me and it would have been hilarious to see the main premise try to navigate this problem... and they do, by basically using it as a feature.

Here goes... the first candidate to be the bearer of his child is this hot angel girl, who they make clear is a virgin. Playing up the whole Angel thing I assume. She's the one to inform him of what he is supposed to do to help save the world. Here's where my problem begins. He doesn't want to. He flat out says no multiple times throughout all of these interactions. So the angel chick continues to come onto him and turn him on until he passes out. Now, what I wanted to have happen is this girl be concerned for his well being and basically stop all advances. Then try to come up with strategies on how they can mate without him passing out and basically getting to know him in the process so that he would say yes to all of this. But that never happens, his whole passing out is now a feature, because he's still aroused after losing consciousness the Angel just has sex with him. He wakes up with her cleaning up and wondering what happened. The manga tries to play this off as a “funny” thing because the main character is so stupid he doesn't realize he's just been raped (I know, absolutely hilarious). This literally happens chapter after chapter as they introduce the next round of girls. One of the girls is outright violent with him, even forcefully kissing him (which they inform us is his first kiss)... which is totally hilarious until she rapes him... At this point I'm absolutely shocked Yen Press of all publishers has picked up this title.

I mean, there's a part in here where the main character gets re-introduced to his childhood best friend where they reminisce about the past and play video games. Until, at the end of their day, she says she's one of the chosen maidens. Then she proceeds to restrain him and rape him. Like, wow... awesome. What even is this? Then we get to the obligatory loli character who is a 100 year old dwarf, so hey, she's legal age right? Yeah, she still looks about 8... but isn't it just funny that because she's so small she can't successfully complete her mission because he doesn't fit in? Oh man... filled with humor here. This is where I was 100% done with this, if the nail in the coffin wasn't the best friend, this absolutely should be for anyone reading this. This should have been a hard stop for the publishers both here and overseas and I can't figure out why this proceeds.

This volume actually ends with our main character realizing he's been getting raped by these girls all this time and oh wow... the funny? I think I would have had less of a problem if this wasn't a comedy. I don't mind stories engaging these tough subjects, but this really plays into the problems of men who get raped by women in a very similar way it's brought up when women get raped. You know the narrative where if a women gets raped there's always some idiot who chimes in with “well, what was she wearing” as if her clothing were consent. In stuff like this the narrative is on the male end is “well, was she hot?” As if men automatically consent simply because someone is attractive. The manga absolutely plays it off that way. It's “funny” that he doesn't want to have sex with these women, because they're all so hot, why wouldn't he? ha ha... yeah no.

For the record, I do NOT mind reading manga with adult themes, but I do care about how it is all handled. Take World's End Harem, for example, there is a point in the story where a man is kidnapped and he is raped and they absolutely treat it as torture. One of the reasons I appreciated that manga, even though it is basically hentai, is because the author has one thing that he uses, consent. Rekomaru Otoi has no such use for consent in this manga and I get the impression this will turn into a sort of “Stockholm Syndrome-esque” scenario where over the next few volumes he will learn to enjoy being with his rapists. Heck, he has them go to a waterpark together with our main characters other male friends and his friends are all impressed with how hot the girls are.

Now, I could be totally wrong and volume 2 could get ultra serious about the topic of consent, but this is marketed as a comedy and the use of what is “comedic” in this volume leads me to believe that this thing won't trend this way. I don't think I'll ever find out, because I'm giving this a hard pass after this.

I'm really big on the whole narrative that consent is hot, and it really really is. I wanted to like this manga and it's setup could have been absolutely hilarious. If they had introduced this scenario and our main character was like “hell yeah, I get to bang all these hot chicks” with all parties consenting and then they have to figure out his pass out problem... yes, that would have been hilarious. But this manga took a hard nope at that concept and just went for... what? Rape fantasy? I don't know, it's just not worth it and as people are fond of saying these days. I'm just tired.

The way I got into finding this book was when I saw the movie in High School when it came out. It was on TV often enough, and for some reason it always escaped me that the beginning of the movie, but it says it's based on a book. So, I eventually came across it in a book store and many years later I finally picked up off my “too read pile.”

Now, in the 90's it was pretty common for books to movies to be pretty different. This is, by far, one of the more bizarre transitions from book to movie. To a certain degree the changes they made were fairly sensible. The book is over 400 pages so there's no way to fit this into a 2 hour film, so one of the things the film did was simplify the cast. Margo Greene, the grad student in the book seems to have gotten an upgrade and now she's got her PhD and actually runs the lab! Quite the promotion from book to movie. This sort of made sense, but changing the direction from the tall Ian Cuthbert to the incredibly short Anne Cuthbert played by Linda Hunt was a very weird change. (Don't get me wrong, Linda Hunt did great in this film and I liked her character, if anything I was disappointing to find her character wasn't exactly in the film.) Now, for the most maddening switch. The Relic is supposed to kick off the stories involving FBI Detective Pendergast and he's not in this movie at all. This book kicks off a whole bunch of books involving this character and it makes any hope for a sequel kind of impossible now doesn't it? I imagine the authors were absolutely livid when they saw what the script writers have done to their idea.

Anyway, onto the book. As usual, the book was better than the movie, but I still liked the movie for what it is. I was disappointed the movie killed a different array of characters off and wish they had kept that true to the film at least. I will say, the movie made a judicious choice by changing Whittlesey to Whitney. Every time the book referenced Whittlesey I totally stumbled over this name and wish the authors had chosen something way more reasonable... this isn't a fantasy novel after all where I expect to ponder the pronunciation of things like “Drizzt” from R.A. Salvatore.

If you've seen the movie you get the basic gist of the story. One of the things that threw me is the advert at the top on the cover “Far above Crichton's Jurassic Park” - Booklist... yeah, that's not really true. Relic is good, but it's not topping Crichton in my opinion. Child and Preston try to do their best to root this in science and history, so it is pretty influenced by Crichton in that respect. I would say that if you like Crichton, you'll probably enjoy a lot about this book. Preston and Child did an awesome job telling a thrilling tale involving the back rooms of a museum. I can confirm that a lot of the things they talk about here are true, my girlfriend has worked in the backrooms of one of the museums at Harvard for quite a few years and everything they talked about and described in the book reminded me a lot of being there. My girlfriend was even working on the genetics end and has run her fair share of PCR's! So, knowing all this lingo was a lot of fun for me.

I think the reason this book gets compared to Jurassic Park because it also has a hard science/genetic aspect of the book and it is also a monster tale. So, plan on a monster showing up in the museum to start killing people, naturally. In this regard the book was pretty great, except that towards the end I feel like they fell into the trap of making the monster be everywhere. First it was in the basement, then it was on the fourth floor! But it never felt like time passed in between these events, which I feel is a bit of a common trope in monster movies. Aside from that it also had it's fair share of museum politics and if you're into that kind of drama this was interesting to read. Again, it sure did bring back some memories... because it was kind of accurate. Throw in the whole detective hunt and police drama aspects and you have quite a lot going on in a single story. At times it might have felt like a bit too much to navigate, because there was just so much going on, but I think Preston and Child did a good job of making all aspects pretty exciting to read. It was certainly a page turner and I really did tear through the book.

I'm a bit nervous to take on the next book, because it feels like the story would get silly to continue... but the authors ended it in such a way to leave an opening for a sequel. I wasn't expecting to log on here and see 18 books in a series... but we'll see. It might be a while before I delve into the stories of Pendergast again, they didn't leave me with that much of a burning desire for more. Either way, this was a fun read and I definitely enjoyed it.

The second book in my introduction to the Battletech Universe as I try to read everything in order. This is also the second installment for the Gray Death Legion and the story picks up shortly after the first novel. This time the Gray Death Legion has officially started built from the spoils of their fight with the Draconis Combine back on Trellwan.

“Mercenary's Star” is an exciting Military Sci-Fi novel that is fast paced and further solidifies the feel of the Battletech Universe. Keith rounds out the concept even more with more intergalactic players and touches of political intrigue that goes beyond the Mech battles. We start by seeing the Gray Death trying to make their name on Galatea a world known as a place to hire mercenaries. Since Carlyle and his band is not part of any formal military organization after Trellwan he sets up shop on Galatea and seeks to recruit more MechWarriors, so in this book we are introduced to a few new people. As is typical of these stories I never expected everyone to live and indeed having some personal “cannon fodder” makes for good story telling, while the stars of the show appear to be nearly immortal. But that's standard procedure for sci-fi of this nature and just makes for a good story, regardless of how “real” it seems.

Here Carlyle and his mercs are hired on to travel to Verthandi a planet under the subjugation of the Draconis Combine. Given the fact that this was written in the 80's and Keith is a child of the Cold War, indeed the whole Battletech setup feels somewhat inspired by it, I can't help but see the parallel's between the USSR/Communist Nations (Draconis Combine) and the USA/Western World (Lyran Commonwealth) in the telling of these tales. The Dracos seem to run their ship in a very strict fashion and it's often their undoing, because the concept of questioning a commanding officer or even suggesting an alternative seems difficult for their officers. This is opposed to the stark difference where Carlyle seems to run his show far more democratically, even though it is often said that “there needs to be one commander” (which probably only applies to the battlefield really), he often takes votes from his crew to figure out what should be done.

I will admit that in the first book I wasn't super keen on Carlyle, he was too... how do I say... clumsy in his character development? I think Keith tried to make him out to be a Noob and experienced all at once, and it just felt sort of weird. But now that Carlyle has some better background for his ideas, I think his character development here went a bit better. Lori's character, whom I liked immediately, grows a bit more in this book and she's as likable as ever. The Keith has set this whole thing up with them is painfully reminiscent of a Han Solo vs. Princess Leia vibe. I think the comparison to Star Wars is somewhat unavoidable, because Carlyle is often built around a sort of “scoundrel” character archetype. And not that Lori is a princess or anything, but she carries that
“take no crap” Leia vibe. It's a good thing Keith did a decent job of making Carlyle and Lori his own, because it would be somewhat painful reading otherwise. There wasn't a massive amount of development between the two characters, because he was so busy writing about new characters and interacting with the rebels. Lori kind of got brushed off the side, or at least that's how I felt, and only came up as a foil to her feelings of turmoil with Gray. In that regard things felt a tad one sided, but you have to remember this is written in the 80's... so I do have lower expectations on that front a bit.

The Star Wars parallel doesn't really end there, because it just makes the whole Draconis Combine feel like The Empire. In this book the Gray Death are hired to help train the rebel forces on Verthandi. And after some choice encounters I was truly waiting for a Combine officer to utter the infamous “you rebel scum” at one of the characters at some point. Either way, I didn't mind it that much, anytime you have big Cold War styled formats cast into deep space they're going to have a Star Wars feel, and Star Wars isn't even the first to take this idea and run with it, it's just the most commonly known reference as far as I can tell.

Anyway, the Gray Death land on this planet faced with the seemingly impossible task of being hopelessly outgunned and training a force to compete with a full military. Keith does a great job of describing this Mech battles, but I will say, having played the actual game, Carlyle gets WAY too many head shots in this book. Like, an unrealistic amount. They always play it up as a “lucky headshot”, but it happened way too often in my opinion, it makes Carlyle seem like a god tier Mech pilot, but he's not even that experienced compared to some of the military personal Keith pits him against. Some of the Draconis fighting style made me think of the revolutionary war, where the British just marched in a column and expected their opponents to do the same and were just flabbergasted that the untrained commoners would engage in guerrilla warfare instead. This certainly made for an amusing read watching the Dracos stumble over themselves in this way.

In the end, I really enjoyed this story and I look forward to reading more adventures of the Gray Death in the next volume. The Battletech Universe is absolutely massive and these stories only gives us a very small insight into that larger history. I highly recommend these if you're already a fan of the game.

Well, I've done it. I've made it all the way through the unabridged copy of The Stand and it took me well over a year to do it. Granted I had to take quite a break from it about half way through. Some people may be reading this and saying “well, why didn't you read the abridged version?” Because I like reading something as fully as possible and I just know if there are 400 pages cut out of something I would wonder about them, so I may as well get the whole story while I'm at it.

At this point in 2020, there's no need for a synopsis of this book. Super Flu that was created by humanity wipes out most of humanity. This wasn't exactly cutting edge thinking in the 70's and it certainly isn't in 2020 given the fact I finished this book off amidst our own Pandemic. The Stand is a little more than a post-apocalyptic survivors tale though, it's also a re-working of the timeless Good vs. Evil. The religious bent of the book is somewhat light and up until the last few hundred pages you really only experience smatterings of any religious element in the tale. For that, I am grateful, because I would have not made it through a thousand pages of preaching. No, instead, I think, King takes a more realistic approach to this. The “miracles” most experience are minor and it is often questioned if they are real or a lot of it is dream based. So, I think King tries to take a more realistic re-working of some religious tales and I thought that was a good approach and made the story feel more real to me. There wasn't much of a character having a dream and running off blindly to serve, instead the characters constantly question their dreams, which I think makes for a better narrative.

This is probably around a 3.5 for me, I did not entirely hate the book, but I also did not love the book. One of the things I did not like was the large swathes of writing dedicated to walking. This is like King's variant on “The Fellowship of the Ring”, both texts were made impossibly boring by all the walking. The tale of the long journey works for a little while in my book, and I would not outright cut it, but at some point in these kinds of stories I want the author to get on with it. I am not the type of reader that needs to experience the arduous tale akin to the characters, there are so many books to read we can cut these journeys a little shorter. To his credit, I think the 2nd journey taken by our characters was a bit more well paced and didn't feel as long. I'm referring to the walk from Boulder to Las Vegas in this case.

In some ways I think King realized the first part of the journey was taking a while and so he inserted more action sequences and the story of The Kid came into light. It's funny, because in my unabridged version there's a whole write up in the preface about the editing of the first publication and how he regrets having to cut out The Kid's story. For me, I did not like this part, albeit I was thankful for a reprieve of walking. However, The Kid's story felt so haphazard to me in the span of King's grand tale. Maybe that is just me... It was after this story that I really needed a break and thus took quite a few months off and probably read about 30 books before picking this up again to try and finish it.

A huge portion of the middle is the tale of our characters settling into Boulder, Colorado and I actually quite enjoyed this part of the book. It was like a Post Apocalyptic slice of life story. How does one go about rebuilding? Is it even possible? Do you have the man-power and know-how? I loved watching the group struggle with these ideas about society.

Towards the end there's an incredibly interesting line that echoes the times of today as there are protests in the streets concerning police brutality: “You didn't have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn't remember the names... the faces...” King is referring to an incident in the book where the new Sheriff argues to the new Committee that his deputies should be armed, because one of them was injured by a drunk man. King's character Stu says in his own sort of monologue that they would probably have a dead drunk instead of just an injured man. I think what the line I quoted really means is that it's a lot easier for people to shoot at each other if you don't know them. He warns about the new settlement getting so big that you no longer have an interpersonal connection with those around you. And it's true. Humans can only manage to have so many personal connections, before it begins to fray and we just don't know much about other people. It just meant a lot to me reading this in 2020, even though King wrote this quite a while ago originally, but he was also writing on the heels of another Civil Rights Movement.

I think King is a good writer and loves to write. That's sort of a double edged sword sometimes, because sometimes it means a writer will write too much and have no way to stop. I think that happens in his books. I appreciate the attempt at realism, but sometimes I feel like we don't need all of it, because I also live in the real world and I can fill on some of the gaps on my own without too much effort. I'll probably never read this book again, but I am glad I delved into at least once in my life time. I think The Stand tries to be a thoughtful book on the building blocks of society and in that regard it wildly succeeds. I rather think the whole religious journey didn't even need to be there sometimes... but that part of the book sure did create an interesting air of mystery at times!

This is the second book in Gerald Brandt's “San Angeles” series. This book picks up a year after the first book left off and I didn't think it was nearly was good as the first book. To be honest the book sort of bounced around a 2.5 and a 3.5 for me depending on how cliché things got. In fact, as I was getting towards the end of the book this whole story format just started to remind me more and more of Star Wars. I mean, I realize Star Wars isn't super original either, but I figure it's a big enough franchise that people can follow the example. Kid gets caught up in war between two factions, “rebel” side saves them, and helps train them to fight the evil empire. The first book ended with a hopeful idea, because our main characters are the “New Hope”. So this being the 2nd book, means we're at “The Empire Strikes Back”, which means it's going to be super tragic and not have a happy ending, all to set up for the final ending.Aside from a few twists here and there, this format became painfully predictable over time, I even skipped to the end to see if I was right. I was. “The Operative” picks up about a year later from “The Courier” and our hero Kris Merrill has been in the ACE training camp for a full year. Her relationship with Ian has blossomed and things to seem to be on track for a good life. At this point, I was really looking forward to this turning into a power couple tale about how Ian and Kris hooked up and took down the evil corporations. Alas, I did not get that tale. Not enough books out there, in my opinion, do a solid power couple. If you want a solid power couple sci-fi novel check out Jacey Bardford's [b:Empire of Dust 21864071 Empire of Dust (Psi-Tech #1) Jacey Bedford https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1398794655l/21864071.SY75.jpg 41154158] which kicks off her own trilogy. So far that one does fairly well. Anyway, back to “The Operative”, one thing I did like is that Gerald Brandt wastes no time getting to the action. He barely spent any time developing Kris' life in the camp before it gets attacked.The reason it gets attacked is, frankly, pretty stupid. Jeremy, the main bad guy from the first novel, isn't dead. In fact he's back and seeking vengeance of Kris for ruining his plan in the first book. The whole 'he can't wait until she's out of training' aspect gets brought up in the book and it's just stupid to me. But it did make for an exciting motivator. Ian basically gets captured right away and is out of commission the entire novel. So much for my power couple hopes... In fact Ian is tortured throughout the entire book and if that sort of thing disturbs you this may have to get a pass. It's nothing overly gory, mostly sticking with electrical shock stuff, but I'm sure some readers would like a pass on that as well. If it got really gory, I would definitely have just skipped those chapters.Kris winds up being brought back to San Angeles and the whole story revolves around her trying to get Ian back amidst this other rebellion that starts to happen. She hooks up with her old friend Kai who ran the Chinese Restaurant in the first book and his back history runs way deeper than we ever saw in the first book. I thought he was a great character. As another reviewer pointed out, there is almost too much going on and it seems like Brandt was a little overzealous to create too much at once. It's not like I need simple stories, but I think certain levels of character development suffered.Speaking of suffering. There's just entirely too much of it. I can get behind making stories more gritty and harsh, and then there's doing this excessively. A vast amount of time was spent on describing the various characters traumas and general injuries. Just to get the point across that what they were doing was difficult. What they were doing was already difficult, but pages are spent describing how much MORE difficult it was while injured. The only reason this got annoying is due to the absolute volume of this. There was a lot of story development pages wasted on just talking about how hard it was to do things while Pat had a PTSD breakdown. And I'm sure it was difficult, but by the second episode I didn't need it re-described to me again, even though what triggered it was different. It seemed like Brandt just wanted to pile tragedy on tragedy, to the point where it just got tiresome and made everything overly predictable even in the end. To the point where it is revealed early on that Kris is pregnant with Ian's child. Because what would make the story more tragic and more difficult??? Doing it all while pregnant. This is where Brandt skirts the line for writing a female character poorly. What makes her more of a woman? I know! Being pregnant. Come on, this is the far future, do you really think she could accidentally get pregnant? Or that ACE would want their operatives getting pregnant mid-training. I'm sorry, this is just a stupid thing to add in and didn't need to be there. But it set up the over predictability of Ian's fate... because what's more tragic than having a child? Having one alone. ugh.So... in the end. “The Operative” kept up it's high octane action packed story, but fell absolutely flat in the over tragedy department. I like Brandt's world building and I love the action/adventure parts of this book, but he really needs to back off on the obsession of describing trauma. That was a problem in the first book and it just got worse in this one. If you want high octane stories like this Kieran Shae's [b:Koko Takes a Holiday 18490895 Koko Takes a Holiday (EBK, #1) Kieran Shea https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1384714035l/18490895.SY75.jpg 25738840] is how you do it! Granted Shae's second novel fell into the “let's make this overly tragic” trap, but overall it did make more sense and had better character development. Anyway, I usually will keep Sci-Fi books that I find really entertaining, but at this point Brandt's book series is not making my cut. I can't see myself re-reading this story, maybe the third book will wrap up super good, but the events that happened in this one has me worried and leaves a sour taste in my mouth (I know that was his point, but it could have been written better).

I have had to sit down and read this a second time to really put my thoughts together on this review. Based on scanning through some of the reviews, I think a lot of people would benefit from reading Gibson's foreword in the collected edition. It really does explain the conditions under which he wrote this script. So, if you're at all confused about why Ripley is barely in this treatment... well... that's because the executives told him to. He wanted to include Ripley, but he was told to effectively put her character on stand by.I'm really glad I got the collected edition and read that foreword because it really tempered my expectations of what I was about to read. I'm quite a fan of Gibson's work and I've read almost all of his novels so far. He's one of the few authors I list as a must read more than once, so, naturally, when I saw this on the shelf I bought it immediately. I hated Alien 3, as did quite a few people. My dislike for Alien 3 kind of has nothing to do with the story. I think the idea of an Alien loose on a prison planet is a great idea and makes for a great movie... but I don't think it makes for a great Ripley story. It makes for an even worse sequel to Aliens because of the way Bishop, Hicks, and Newt were handled. I think if it had just been a separate story and nothing to do with Ripley it would have made for an absolutely excellent film. The Aliens universe is big enough to not include Ripley in every single encounter and I wish they had realized that when putting that movie together and written a different story for our heroes of the second film.All that being said, given Gibson's writing prowess I had pretty high expectations of an amazing movie. Luckily, I read his description of how things went down and I greatly lowered my expectations for this story. First off, Gibson is not a script writer. This was the first one he'd ever done and this was also his first commissioned work. What Gibson is, is an Aliens fan, so he wrote within his understanding of that framework. But in retrospect, he suspects the real reason he was chosen to write a script was to include some of that Cyberpunk flash he's known for... unfortunately for them, he stayed pretty solidly within the bounds of the Aliens universe and kept everyone out in space. He figures the execs were planning on cannibalizing's his ideas and adding them to another script they liked more.So, it's no surprise this has been shelved for years until it got dug up more recently. What we got was both pretty good and pretty bad all at the same time. We get a weird fever dream of Gibson's interpretation of the organisms evolutionary prowess, which just doesn't actually fit within the realms of the universe to well... And even with all those aspects that are not good, I STILL think this would have been better than Alien 3!Gibson's Alien 3 has the Sulaco veering off course at the end of Aliens and finding itself in some sort of weird border dispute involving an independent communist society, the UPP, and Weyland-Yutani space. I suppose the Berlin Wall had recently come down around the time he wrote this, so he was probably inspired by what was happening in the world at that time. In any event there is an Alien presence on the Sulaco still, just as there is at the beginning of the actual Alien 3, makes me wonder how much of a prompt this was, or if they took it from Gibson's script? From here the ship winds up docking with a Weyland-Yutani research station once it leaves the UPP space. From here Ripley is injured and knocked out and remains unconscious for the entire story. Hicks, Newt and Bishop are around for the story though. I'm not going to give away all the happenings, but Gibson does a great job covering the nuances of political concerns and the general issues with corporate hierarchy. This was, naturally, brought up through the whole beginning of Aliens and the Carter Burke character, so Gibson included that. His writing of megacorporate concerns is always something very good, so this aspect of the story was very well done.The part of the story that was not well done was the Aliens aspect. So, there was a lack of Aliens available, so Gibson's solution to this problem was to have the research facility take samples from the Sulaco and start cloning them. They combined stuff with human DNA and made some super virulent strain. Humans exposed to this new thing mutate and grow into Aliens through some rapid evolution. It occurs to me that this is pretty similar to the Black Goo introduced in Prometheus. This was generally a phenomenally bad idea and one of the reasons Prometheus wasn't very good... Gibson, unfortunately, couldn't save the concept in my opinion either. The super mutation strain just comes off as over the top and weird. This is, honestly, a thread the Aliens franchise should just drop and never revisit. They should retcon it out of the franchise entirely. The theories around the Aliens being “built” by the engineers is way cooler and that's the thread they should have tugged on a lot more. On top of that, when these humans mutate into Aliens they have weird red eyes in the skull... it recalls some early Geiger prop designs I've seen with a human top half of the skull going to the elongated head. Gibson's idea just sort of look like weird Alien Terminators or something. Although, once again, it reminisces the idea of the weird Alien creature “born” at the end of Alien: Resurrection. Again, a phenomenally stupid idea, which killed an otherwise quite entertaining film, mostly carried by Ron Perlman. Ultimately, it's not that the story is bad, it just wound up feeling incongruous to the franchise. The whole live in space station idea reminded me a lot of what the game Alien: Isolation would include, except the ship design in Isolation is completely from the movie Alien, which made the game all the more awesome. Ah well... as a first go around, I find it hard to fault Gibson too much for the things I did not like. This was his first go around with this kind of thing and the general story is pretty good. Some of the details are just quite lacking. Johnnie Christmas' art does a good job of complementing the tale and bringing it to life. If you're a huge Aliens fan, this is a nice little curio for your collection, if you're here for the Gibson flair, you might be as disappointed as the execs. Sadly this is not Cyberpunk Aliens... although, I do think that would make for a really interesting setting and future stories published by Dark Horse do have that kind of feel, such as [b:Aliens - Music of the Spears 28175009 Aliens - Music of the Spears Chet Williamson https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1449865702l/28175009.SY75.jpg 48193491].

If you got the “Book of Cain” and enjoyed it, then it's likely you will enjoy the second book in this style called “Book of Tyrael”. In Diablo III we see that Cain is killed and at first you think Lea is going to take up his tale as chronicler, but we all know her fate at the end. Instead it is Tyrael that takes up the charge of continuing where Cain left off. This book is kind of a hodgepodge of tales where it combines a lot of research from all three voices in the Diablo histories. Only a short portion of the book is “written” by Tyrael, before it switches over to an overall history of the land.

This book takes place between Diablo III and the expansion pack Reaper of Souls, to give people an idea of where this sits in the lore. It's designed in the same way as the “Book of Cain” and, unfortunately, I wasn't able to get my hands on the hardcover edition, so I was stuck with the paper back. They kept up the same spirit of the “dusty old” book that looked like it had fading pages. On that front everything is beautiful. However, on a few pages here and there the backgrounds are a tad dark. They're certainly not unreadable, I think they just printed darker than the original design team probably expected them too.

In the end if you're a fan of Diablo and you want to expand the lore of your archive then this is an awesome addition to your collection of Diablo books. I wonder if they will print more like this in the future as they seemed to have sold alright, we'll see what happens if a Diablo IV ever comes about in the future.

I've finally made it... I made it to the end of this absolutely awful series. If this wasn't the last book in the series, I never would have bothered reading this thing. I can't, for the life of me, figure out why ID agreed to commission this book after the third book had almost nothing to do with the Doom series. Or why they didn't kill the contract at this point. “Endgame” has even less to do with the Doom series and even if this wasn't a Doom book this would still rank amongst the worst books I have ever read. If this had been a stand alone book and not the last in this series I probably would have called it quits by page 50. I'm usually fairly easy to please in the sci-fi department, so for me to say this is pretty out there, usually I can find some reason to kick things to a 2 or 3 star... but this book has nothing worth reading. I would actually give this book zero stars if that was actually an option. I don't even know where to begin...

If you'll remember, I complained in the last review that “Infernal Sky” had way too many first person voices, well “Endgame” brings us back to basics like “Knee-Deep in the Dead”, so all we hear is Fly Taggart's narrative. At least that aspect of the book the authors made better.

As we've been subjected to the entire series, the naming convention chosen by Dafydd and Brad are just terrible. Even the first book deviated from the actual game by naming the monsters differently and that should have given us all red flags from day one. The naming conventions created by the characters in the first book were terrible and that theme just gets progressively worse as this novel series continues. It was already a literary tragedy when they named the species at fault for the Doom monsters “Freds”, but they took it to all new heights of stupidity in this book. In this book, they find an even more threatening alien species and they call them the “Newbies”. Are you serious??! When this happened I just wanted to throw the book across the room. Somehow these two authors managed to take bad writing and make it worse.

One of the big climaxes of “Infernal Sky” was that they were finally on their way to the Fred planet, who were the species responsible for sending the Doom monsters to Earth. When they finally arrive, after pages and pages of just nothing about what the characters do on a near deserted space ship, they get to the Fred planet to find out they've all been killed off by these Newbies. WTF. So... no big boss battle... in a book, allegedly, in the Doom franchise... right. THEN they go after the Newbies and get to the planet they're supposed to be. Deserted. No battle. (They find some humans there, but read on for the next rant.) Eventually, the main characters finally get back to Earth... no battle. Also, deserted. So, like, the fourth book in Doom is 95% “character development”, because there's nothing to really fight anywhere the heroes go. What in the world is the point of even writing this?

When our heroes finally catch up to the Newbies on a different planet they actually run into a group of humans there. But they're infected by the Newbies. The Newbies evolve ultra fast and by the time our heroes get there they've evolved into microbes instead of whole humanoid like beings! You heard me... they evolved INTO microbes. Now these microbes can take over the human body/mind, but not our heroes. Oh no, they have a secret immunity. Faith. Fly has faith in god and Arlene has faith in humanity... it has to be one of the stupidest attempts at inserting some sort of religious concept into a book I have ever stumbled into. It's like this whole veiled attempt to tell readers “See, faith can save you!” This series was already getting a little preachy with the Mormon's showing up, but now it's gone full tilt.

Aside from the religious dogma being thrown at us, which they try to make seem “inclusive” by having Arlene, an atheist (and having faith in whatever you want)... this book takes a whole new turn into political systems and economics. See, the authors find the time in this book to rail against socialism and communism for some reason. Based on their assessment of human society I feel like neither author even remotely knows what either of these things are. Apparently, while building a society based on community and serving society as a whole, people will become so individualistic that they won't be able to have a working military anymore. Why? Well, because you can't take orders if you're an individual... or so their theory goes. Last time I ran into books about actual Communism it didn't stop Stalin from having an army... Also, Capitalism is the only possible way for the human race to survive, because even though under this new Socialist government the authors dreamed up they were able to advance technology to extreme levels, people just can't function as a group and don't know how their technology works... it's starting to feel awful Brave New World up in here.

The authors also take whatever chances they can get to take pot shots at college educated people. Never mind the fact that Arlene is apparently smart and college educated, Fly hates colleges. Teaching people how to think is bad in Fly's book and he hates officers because of it. I mean, who could ever want an educated population?

They try to wrap up the Jill and Albert story lines, albeit horribly. They even have a section where Jill wrote a thing about why the Freds and the rest of the Aliens in the galaxy were even having a war. They were fighting over a literary interpretation of ancient texts, which was brought up in the third book... guess what. This “explanation” just rehashes the same explanation from the prior novel. It's almost like the authors forgot they said this already. It provides no new insight and they don't even say what these texts are. Give me a break. To make matters even more idiotic, Jill also wrote two books on the history of the Fred invasion... guess what their titles are? That's right! The first two books in the Doom series written by our authors.

Anyway, Jill figured out how to clone herself and Albert. Fly and Arlene find their clones frozen in stasis awaiting revival. Jill had her clone grown to the age of 15 and no further... why? Probably because the authors wanted the original party to be exactly back to where it was. Oh yeah, and this is on an entirely abandoned Earth mind you. What happened to the rest of humanity? They don't even say. Yeah... Oh and the Klave characters just leave once they make it to Earth. That's it. They just go home.

The only combat we really run into is in a simulation where Fly and Arlene's souls are trapped into a computer by the Newbies. Guess what? It's a simulation of the first novel! And our authors spend pages upon pages going through the first book again. Sure there are some changes, but WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?!?!?

Oh, and I can't forget the sexism. The sexism is infuriating at this point in the four books. I mean, it's pretty constant throughout the series, but it just feels so excessive at this point. Every chance the authors get Fly quips in about how he noticed Arlene's breasts jiggle under her shirt. Just to constantly remind us that Fly is a hot blooded American manly man? Okay, I have no issue with it being brought up at all, because guys do notice this, but the constancy with which they bring it up is what's disturbing. But then they spend an obscene amount of time with Fly explaining over and over how he would never have sex with Arlene, because they are just friends... but, just so you now, she's pretty hot... que topless scene. The constant explanation just feels like page filler at this point, because the authors have to meet their commission, and what better filler than constant objectification of women. I think the real horrific part was the end of the book where it features the 15 year old Jill clone naked and “Fly trying not to look where he shouldn't”. Are you serious right now? In the earlier book they even mention how Jill tried to seduce Fly, but yet her clone is 15? But let's not forget Jill is a genius... and, obviously, her best chances at landing Fly is in her 15 year old form. Authors... I have questions about your interests...

Finally, the book closes with “The End...?” No, dude, no. No question mark. This series needs to be done. Save trees and hard drive space by never writing in franchise ever again.

At the heart of things, I feel like these authors wanted to write an entirely different book and from day one they were thinking of how they could possibly start with the premise of the Doom video game and somehow transform it into veiled lecture about being over educated, faith being essential to human survival and capitalism being the only possible economic system that bestows individuality on our species.

Please, don't read this book. I read it so you don't have to. The book really makes no sense and is just bad writing and bad story telling all around. It's so inane that this is like an incredibly bad fever dream. I'd say it was like a bad acid trip, but that would probably be more interesting. This is like the authors taking acid and they trip out and do nothing, except make up stupid names for things. Just absolutely awful. I hated this book... but I assumed that going in and it lived up to my expectations. Even exceeding them in some cases. Please, don't read this.

As with all the other Koko books this was a fast paced wild ride! Basically, if you've made it this far into the Koko series you're not going to be disappointed in this story at all. Koko Uncaged finishes up the story that was first laid out in Koko the Mighty.

First off, I will say that I felt like this story was a bit better than Koko the Mighty, because it felt far less forced. Koko the Mighty felt like an excuse to get to this book at times and some of the situations from Koko the Mighty felt a little forced, just to make the story narrative work a specific way. The problems that I had with all of that disappeared with Koko Uncaged! This adventure picks up right where we left off with Koko on her way to the Moon. As usual some bad stuff happens and the ship she is on gets high jacked. Now this is really an excuse to get us from point A to point B, which is the main bulk of the story. Bogart Gong runs the Itokawa Corporation and with Koko's exploits on the high jacked ship behind her, Gong wants a new body guard and Koko will fit that bill very nicely. Koko secures herself a good deal and with her new corporate backing revives the dog Gammy from the prior novel. I loved having Gammy back and the whole synthetic pet thing is such an homage to “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” by Philip K. Dick.

However, Koko may have bit off more than she bargained for because Gong gets himself into a beef with the President of the South American Coalition (SAC), Mermao. Mermao is a crazy man through and through, with delusions of grandeur and everything. It's funny, because when I was reading his character I couldn't help but recall an episode of Parks and Recreation called “Sister City” where a delegation of Venezuela came to visit the small town. In this episode the main delegate, Raul, is played by comedian Fred Armisen and he is exactly how I imagined Mermao the entire time. Anyway, Mermao and Gong agree to have a high speed terrasled race to settle their business problems. Meanwhile Jackie Wire has gotten herself back together and is still on the hunt for Martstellar, but first she returns to the Commonage from the prior book to find out exactly what happens.

So here's where I'll get into some spoiler parts that I didn't like as much. This is very much a sort of everyone dies at the end type of story. Just in case people really hate those. Now, I certainly don't mind characters dying off, but just having everyone die is also a bit excessive in my opinion. I was, honestly, shocked by what Wire did to Flynn and I'm not surprised at his end fate, but I guess it was fully in line with Wire's character. I think I'm more disappointed in Gong's fate, because I think it would have been pretty interesting if he stayed around.

With these three moving parts of the story converging at the most critical of moments it is quite a ride on the way there. I didn't like everything that happened to the characters, but I still tore through this book as I did with all the others. Kieran Shea sure does write a page turner for my tastes. One thing I found interesting is that the book is left somewhat open ended. Perhaps learning his lesson a bit from the first book where the first book felt very stand a lone, but Koko Uncaged leaves things open for a possible follow-up. Naturally, if one does come along I will absolutely read it.

I've owned all the books in this original Doom series for a while and as I was going through my shelves I realized I didn't finish the series. One of the major reasons I didn't immediately delve into book 3, even though these are quick reads, is because of how much I didn't like book 2. Book 1 was a decent representation of the first video game, but Book 2 deviated quite a bit from the Doom II story and here, book 3, just deviates entirely from the Doom universe as far as I can tell.

First things first, this book is incredibly annoying to read. I forgot how much so. Every character is written from a first person perspective. If the book adds a new character, bam, new first person internal dialogue. It's absolutely infuriating and I can't believe any publisher gave the green light to do this. There's about six or so characters in this book and they all get first person, every single one of them. Sometimes the first person perspective switches characters mid-chapter, making the reading of this book all kinds of fun... not.

This book begins with the main group of survivors from Book 2 lounging at a military base in Hawaii. Now that they've linked up with the rest of the organized surviving humans, they start having the Doom standard names for the Demons. Now, you'd think the book would adopt these new names, because these would be familiar to the game players, but no... instead it uses the made up names and they reference back to what they're actually called in the game. Over and over... it's total madness and outright bad writing. It was a bad idea to do it that way from the first book and it's still a bad idea.

So, the biggest bulk of this book is about how they are contacted by another group of aliens and they request to meet. Now, the marines need to get back to the gate on Mars to go meet these new aliens. The varying excuses to kill people and break off characters was absolutely mind numbing. In any event this heavily deviates from the Doom universe and the authors just start making up their own stuff. I think they wanted the book to get more comedic, but it just came off as even worse writing than before. The aliens they run into are “funny”, as in they look goofy, and they talk funny. They have silly antics etc. This is not Doom... this is just something else entirely. Throwing in a couple passages of fighting and gore does not suddenly salvage this nonsense. These creatures and the section of the book are entirely made up and have no presence in the Doom universe.

One of the most maddening parts of the book was how they would introduce new people and just kill them off. Or have a need to bring a recurring character along to just have their story trail off. For example, the story of Jill. She went with the marines to secure the space ship to bring them to Mars (well Mars' moon Phobos). But she couldn't go with them to Mars, so they just left her to get back to the submarine all by herself. She's a genius, but she's not a combat specialist, which they feel the need to remind the reader of often enough. But it seems like her story is going to get told and we return to her trying to get back to the submarine, but she gets lost and doesn't make it. Then her story just disappears. She was still alive, but by the end of this book you have no idea what happened to her. They introduce a new Character, Hidalgo and he goes to Mars and makes it all the way to the new alien world, then onto the space ship to fight the final demons... but then he just suddenly dies. I'm still not clear on exactly what happened. One of the recurring characters from book 2, Albert, he makes it all the way to the Alien ship, then suddenly his suit breaks and he almost dies. But now he can't go on and the journey they need to take, which will take 40 years. So basically, they'll never see him again. This book is just so haphazard. It felt like by the end the whole thing trailed off. There was no real “final boss” like you'd expect from a video game... it just ends.

Okay, I'm going to read the last book. They don't take long to read, but I'm going to make it through this nonsense series! If you are a Doom fan, don't even bother with these stuff. At this point the writing has gotten so progressively bad that it makes me wonder if this was more about the authors creating marine characters or trying to write within the Doom universe... because they certainly gave up on the latter.

This is the first Battletech book in the series. I managed to buy a few of these over the years, but I was always pretty confused on where the start with this series, because it was later “re-started” when RoC took over publishing the novels from FASA and then RoC started re-publishing the old novels, so it was quite confusing... I wound up reading “Way of the Clans” first by accident, but that was the first RoC published book, not the first Battletech novel. Anyway, I fondly remember looking at these novels in Walden Books when I was middle school and always wanting to delve into this series.

Luckily, today, we have Goodreads! So, now, I was able to put this series in perspective and actually start with the real first books. When I read “Way of the Clans” I felt like there was something that I should have known before hand... like twelve other books worth of back story! So here I am, finally at the beginning with “Decision at Thunder Rift” and it was an excellent book. William H. Keith Jr. did a great job of blending in technical descriptions with a well crafted story and really intense battles. He managed to not make this solely about campaign battling, but keep the spirit of the RPG with political intrigue as well.

There are some references that might be a bit confusing like the Succession Wars and why so many of the Mechs are around one hundred years old and in some level of disrepair, but you might need to go read up on the setting to get up to speed on those specific things. Luckily, Wikipedia exists to help people get up to speed on the setting and I do recommend reading over the history article on Battletech before delving into the novels, especially if you are unfamiliar with the game itself.

Anyway, Battletech at this point is set in the 31st century and Keith puts us in a back water planet where negotiations have resulted in the planets care changing hands. However, things don't go as they seem and our main character Grayson Death Carlyle finds himself in the middle of intense political intrigue and though he has never taken a Mech into battle, he has trained all his life for the moment. He will get his chance sooner than he ever thought. Grayson finds himself in charge of a new company of Mechwarriors pieced together and fighting a foe that could easily crush them... but thanks to Carlyle's cunning and the skills of the other MechWarriors, like Lori, they just might be able to overcome such insurmountable odds. This book begins us on quite the saga starring Grayson and Lori.

It's funny, because at first I didn't really like the Grayson character, but I think that's by design, because as the novel continues and Grayson grows beyond his almost Paladin like attitude he becomes far more realistic. Towards the end I really wanted to read more stories about his and Lori's adventures. Now Lori, I liked immediately, she was a great foil to Grayson's idea of “the way the world should be”, because she really represents more what the world is actually like. By the end of the novel I really looked forward to watching these two characters grow together and was pleased to see there are a number of novels after this one concerning them.

If you're first delving into Battletech, the complexity of the universe developed by FASA can seem overwhelming. But the book doesn't really require you to know all the powerful political players, here you really just interact with three of them. Carlyle's original loyalty to the Lyran Commonwealth, the government of Trell (the planet the novel takes place) and the Draconis Combine, enemies of the Lyran Commonwealth. Honestly, the only thing that was over complicated was the day and night system of the planet where the novel takes place. I could have done without this “feature”. All in all an excellent and exciting Sci-Fi novel as far as I'm concerned.

This could probably push to a 4.5 if not for a couple issues I had with the book here and there.

When I read the description of this novel I bought it immediately and I was fairly excited to read it. The description felt sort of like an urban cyberpunk style, which the novel sort of achieves. For me though, the description felt reminiscent of a combination of something William Gibson would create and the show Dark Angel created by James Cameron. Essentially, a hi-tech dystopian action novel. Now, it does hit that mark, but I wouldn't say it's better than either Dark Angel or any William Gibson novel, but it was still a really exciting and fun read.

I'm a big fan of strong female protagonists and the whole courier aspect reminded me a lot of Dark Angel, but it quickly deviated from that memory within the first couple of chapters. I sort of had expectations of building a good character rapport with her delivery company as in Dark Angel, but that was merely a blip in the story backdrop. That was merely motivation for the main character to get her hands on the package.

The overall world building by Gerald Brandt isn't bad, some reviewers seemed to think it wasn't fully developed, but there are two more novels after this one. There are some aspects of this futuristic city-scape that are ridiculous, but this is Sci-Fi... that's par for the course. So just buckle in and enjoy the ride. The world is similar to how we live today, but certain things are taken to massive extremes. Large megacorporations are what really run the whole show, this is very similar to what you find in the Aliens universe and quite a few others, but the way the corporations operate reminds me a bit more like Aliens. In order to confuse their enemies they've taken to low tech package delivery to throw others off the scent. Sometimes they send packages with real information, but most of the time it's worthless info. It may seem weird, but I actually rather liked this explanation as the general need for a robust personal courier industry.

This is where Kris, the courier comes in, she's been asked to deliver a package by one of the major corporations. However, it appears that she may have some real info, given the fact the whole novel is about her escape and subsequent chase through the levels of San Angeles to escape assassins that want to get their hands on the information! Kris manages to elude them and find help with another character that helps her escape named Miller. Kris and Miller foster a fast relationship, but they work together to get away from those chasing after Kris. Miller finds himself in the crosshairs of those chasing Kris and they both have to get away. It was an incredibly fast paced and wild ride and if that's a story you can get into then The Courier nails that aspect of its goal.

As far as the character development goes, it is okay. One of the story arcs that I feel is so tiresome to read about is that anytime (usually men) write about a female character with a “tough” past it often revolves around sexual assault of some kind in their past. Whether this is being raped as a kid, a teen, or whenever in their life... and due to this trauma it gives the character a “deeper” background and more hardened resolve. I know sometimes they try to use this as a gritty aspect of the dregs of society, but that stuff happens everywhere. Sexual assault is not a unique aspect of a fallen society by any stretch of the imagination. There are just so many other things in life that exist that could motivate a character, even in a downtrodden society. It doesn't have to be this. Male characters don't have this background nearly as often and at this point it's tiring. It's almost as if every author that includes this in the book uses it as a sort of “foreshadowing” where later in the book they will be in a similar situation and they will say “never again” and fight back or kill their assailant. It's frustrating and there is just more general possibilities... like all the ones authors seem to find for a male character. (I am not trying to come off as insensitive of this topic, but am just trying to point the overuse of sexual assault being the reason for a characters ‘dark past' used far too often as a literary mechanic.)

The other part that is pretty cliché is the whole standard fair Knight's Tale aspect of the story, where our female lead character gets rescued by a nice guy and then she falls for him. This is also overdone way too much in everything, but the author seemed to be somewhat self aware of this trope with Kris talking about Miller being like a knight. The one saving grace to this is the fact that later she steps up to save him. I am truly hoping this sets up the second book as more of a power couple story, because there aren't nearly enough of those around and it's a story mechanic I like a lot. As long as Brandt can continue to write Kris as growing her competency and a character that can handle her own in a fight... someone that complements Miller, at least, then it will make for a much better story.

In the end “The Courier” had a lot of ideas I liked and it was exactly the action packed type of novel I wanted to read. It absolutely delivers on that front. If you can get beyond the cliché parts of the tale and aren't too squeamish about violence this is pretty intense and fast paced story. Let's hope the second novel can keep the adrenaline rush alive.

It took me forever to read this book because it was just so painful to read. I was lured in with the sort of “sci-fi” idea and that backdrop amidst erotica certainly interests me, but this book is hardly that. Jacob's does not do a great job of world building and instead comes off as lazy at best.

Essentially, this is the story of two planets, one is entirely populated by men and the other populated by women. Naturally, everyone is gay on these planets, except for a few aberrant people. On the female planet if you're “bad enough” the court system will eventually offer you a choice of exile to the planet of men, where the girl will become a sex slave. I feel like in some round about way Jacob's made this mechanic to give the reader some kind of feeling that “well, the main character consented to this treatment”. And that would be all well and good, but the book goes to such extremes that it's hardly erotic and there really is no concept of consent between the woman and man. The only consent is between the woman's government and her... is that enough? It's not really for me and that little fact was hard to get out of my head as I read of this girls extreme torture.

Basically, the main character Etrin is from the planet Ranitz and she is then exiled to Henth and then purchased as a slave by a man named Garid. This novel was a massive power exchange attempt. We are talking full immersion into actual slavery and imagining what that would be like. The problem here is that for a large portion of the book we are told the story through the slave's eyes, which sort of makes sense as we journey with her to break down her mental barriers entirely. So, the book is rather boring in this regard, because there is basically no dialog between the girl and her master. There are just his commands, in a language she doesn't know, and her response to do the right thing or be beaten. It's almost as if Jacob's realized this problem about half way through and started introducing Garid's friends and more of his servants to have something more to talk about in general.

Garid's journey being ultra possessive of his slave grows in the sense that he and his friends get together and Garid learns to share his possession with his friends. The book ultimately ends with the almost obligatory pony training, which I've come to somewhat expect from the English publishers who seem to really fancy this sort of thing. If you really want to read a good book with this topic go for the Penny in Harness stuff, it's written far better.

The real issues I had with this book was that this thing was borderline rape fantasy. The author also made special points in the beginning to emphasize how much bigger the men were. I suppose there's some logic to this that with men breeding amongst themselves they'd just get bigger? But it felt more like the whole point was to emphasize the girls child-like size... which was anything but erotic. Furthermore, Garid's whole goal was to break Etrin's will down to animalistic characteristics, not human. They make special points to dehumanize all the women in this book as much as possible and reiterate often enough that they are little more than animals. This almost has a Stockholm Syndrome fantasy where Etrin becomes devoted to Garid, even though he basically beats and rapes her higher level mental functions out of her. This got worse towards the end of the book and made it hard to read... then at the end the author makes sure to say that Garid loves his slave... I don't know... just doesn't seem that way.

As another reviewer pointed out the story about Garid's friend Therin was much better. I think the book would have been better if it was about him.

If you're into absolutely extreme power exchange then maybe you'll get more out of it. However, if you're here for sci-fi erotica... this is NOT it. This is entirely different.

In my adventures of delving into Clive Cussler novels I've been mainly focusing on the Dirk Pitt series. I've managed to make it to book 7 which puts me in the 1980's for Cussler. I decided to take a break from Dirk and delve into one of his newer books. Cussler's writing has been steadily improving, but I thought I would dive into something newer to see how much it improved over the years. “The Chase” was published in 2007 and I have to say, it's a massive difference.

Cussler usually has pretty good story ideas, but his execution of the tale wasn't always amazing, maybe that's a little bit biased since I tend to read more modern books, but the stuff published in the 70's and 80's...seems to be pretty standard for their era. “The Chase” being post 2000 has a far more modern feel to the overall story craft. Cussler's writing is a lot smoother and he manages to make the 400 pages fly by.

“The Chase” introduces us to a new character named Isaac Bell, and if you were expecting him to be very different from Dirk Pitt... well, he's really not. He's basically Dirk Pitt with a different job at the turn of the century. I love the turn of the century setting and looking at the cover and reading the description was what solidified my interest in reading this sooner than later. I was definitely into the idea of cops and robbers involving old locomotives and “The Chase” definitely delivers that. I think this also was an excuse for Cussler to explore turn of the century automobiles as well (turn of the century will always be 1800's into 1900's for us old people). Such as Bell's choice car, the Locomobile, a company that I bet very few people except old car enthusiasts know all about. I certainly didn't know anything, but sure enough I found myself on Wikipedia reading about the manufacturers history... I like to think Cussler would have been proud of that.

I think Cussler did an awesome job re-imagining the past and he brought up specific historical events to make it feel all the more realistic on top of the machines people are racing around in. For example, the devastating Earthquake of 1906 in California was brought up and, once again, I found myself on wikipedia reading all about the event. It got to the point where I wondered if the Butcher Bandit character Cussler created might have existed as well!

One major difference between this book and the Dirk Pitt series is that in this book Isaac meets a woman and he sticks with her. I even checked the next book to see if she was still around and she is! I can't explain how tiring it is to have the Bond girl format where every book has a new female character that the hero beds. I've got nothing against people having sex, but the women just feel so throw away in the early Dirk Pitt novels, similar to how a lot of the early Bond girls are treated, so it will be a nice change of pace to have a female character, hopefully, with some staying power. I think Cussler still isn't great at writing these characters, but I think he did an okay job trying to re-imagine the sentiments and habits of someone in this time frame. For both men and women, whereas the early Dirk Pitt novels feel very one sided.

So, if you're up for a grand adventure to catch a notorious bandit across the West on railroad and early cars then this is a novel for you. If you're already a fan of Cussler, I doubt people would find this disappointing. Other than basically recasting Pitt in a new time frame, which is the only thing I could see people being disappointed in. However, I'll forgive it, because it was a grand adventure and I had a lot of fun reading the book.

More like 3.5

This is Nate Kenyon's second foray into the world of Diablo. Despite being a massive Diablo fan and buying all the extra content upon release Kenyon's last book “The Order” left me so underwhelmed I wasn't sure I wanted to bother with this book. As I'm reviewing this I currently have no memory of what “The Order” even contained, that's how forgettable it was. So, it was with some trepidation that I finally delved into “Storm of Light”.

Kenyon, in my opinion, did a much better job writing “Storm of Light”, but it still wasn't an amazing read over all. I don't think Kenyon can compete with the likes of Knaak or Odom who wrote previous novels. The interesting part of “Storm of Light” is that Kenyon picks up on the tale of Zayl, a character we first met in “The Kingdom of Shadow” written by Knaak. The necromancer character seemed to be so popular that he got a follow-up novel as well. The follow-up, also by Knaak, was an excellent read! So, it was kind of surprising seeing Kenyon take up the mantle of this character that was first created by another author.

“Storm of Light” is the bridge between Diablo III and the expansion Reaper of Souls, so if you've payed Diablo III you're ready to pick up this book. However, there was a five issue comic book series called “Storm of Justice” that is the back story for two of the characters in this book, Shanar and Jacob. In my review of “Storm of Justice” I mentioned Shanar being a great character, while Jacob was lack luster and pretty boring. While Kenyon tried to make the whole thing work and write Jacob as the “rising hero” type, he was still just a boring character. They try to make him be the doubting hero that will rise to the occasion, but he's just so one dimensional it's hard to read about him. That being said, I think “Storm of Light” focuses more on Tyrael and the other heroes gathered together, but if you want to get some background to all the allusions of Shanar and Jacob's past read the comic series “Sword of Justice”.

“Storm of Light” is the story where Tyrael resurrects the Horadrim with all new members and gathers them together to perform a heist in the high heavens. The Black Soul Stone from Diablo III isn't destroyed, but something wrong is happening in the high heavens and Tyrael wants to do something about it. So, he gathers up a new team of Horadrim in the hopes they'll tap into their Nephalem powers when they have to. The overall story is extremely good and Kenyon did a far better job in crafting this than I remember “The Order” ever being.

All that being said... I felt like the story was a bit of a chore to read at times. Kenyon doesn't really do a great job of capturing that sort of action packed feel Diablo gets when you're playing it. This is something Knaak excelled at in the Sin War series. Another reviewer made the comment that “Storm of Light” felt flat, and I have to agree. I think if Kenyon was writing a history book, just about the Diablo universe it would have worked much better. But in terms of fast paced action, he doesn't do a good job with edge of your seat excitement. I think he got too into the lore of the universe and it felt more like a history book author.

So, if you were disappointed in “The Order”, I can say that “Storm of Light” was better, but it wasn't exactly leagues better. I still enjoyed it, and if you're a big Diablo fan I think you will find merit in this book as well. I always enjoy travelling into the Diablo universe, but reading this makes me miss the books by Richard A. Knaak and Mel Odom.

I thought the first novel starring Koko Martstellar was absolutely awesome. It was exactly what I wanted in an action packed cyberpunk sci-fi type of novel. So, I was pretty excited to delve into the second installment when it came out.

“Koko the Mighty” keeps up a similar feel and pacing to the first novel and explores unfinished business with the assassin Koko left alive in the first book, Jackie Wire. This is the mad dash to escape Wire and it brings us to all new parts of the future created by Kieran Shea. While this certainly retains everything we loved from the first novel, I did feel like it wasn't as exciting in some regards.

The only thing I thought was sort of out of place for this book was in the beginning where Koko has Wire subdued but leaves her alive. I felt that was a bit out of character regardless of the consequences. BUT, that's kind of what kicks off the whole story, so it was rather essential to make things work. Given the way the first book ended it's almost as if Shea didn't really plan on writing a sequel at the time, but the character became popular in her own right and a sequel was brought to bear. I, for one, would have been interested in a sequel regardless, so I'll forgive the slightly out of character move, because I got exactly what I wanted out of a novel.

Shea does a good job of building the story and diving deeper into Koko's personality as she tries to transition a life of “me” to a life of “us” and all the inherent conflicts that brings up with her training. This sort of additional baggage, I think, tee's off her intense anger more than expected and I felt she was almost too unhinged at times, but it sort of makes sense with her trying to reconcile new feelings

If you're looking for another action packed wild ride that sits somewhere between a Gibson novel and The Fifth Element (minues aliens) then this is the series for you. Shea has done it again bringing us a no holds barred amped up action packed sequel. As we would have expected!

I can't believe I didn't review this right when I finished this... so it's been a couple years since I read the book. Luckily, I do remember it well enough that I feel I can say something about the story, the fact I've just started the second book helps as well.

I didn't really know what to expect from Empire of Dust, it was a random purchase at a book store. I liked the cover and the synopsis seemed interesting, so imagine my delight to find that such a thick book wound up being quite the page turner. Jacey Bedford masterfully brings us into her world extremely fast. This is something I really appreciated, there's no pages upon pages discussing tech and politics so that readers can get to the real meat of the story. I find such things quite a slog anytime they show up. Sometimes it is necessary, but I prefer books that introduce us to the world as the characters are doing things as well. Bedford did this throughout the book and I highly appreciated it. I won't say Bedford brought any new ideas to the table sci-fi speaking, but at the end of the day she told a really fun and excellent story, which is all I ask for.

One of the strongest aspects of this story is the characters. Bedford has created some of the more life-like characters I've found in sci-fi. They really are like real people and they're truly living in this universe Bedford has carefully designed. I loved it! I think the part I really enjoyed was that care was clearly put into the side characters as well as the main characters. We learn about all the people through their interactions, not just some data dump of who they are like in a lot of other books I've read. No, we get to see these people in action and hear their opinions about things because they say them! Bedford wrote in this sort of effortless way where the story just flowed through the pages. It takes me a long time to read books, but when a book flows really well, I can usually get through them pretty quickly and before I knew it, I was 200 pages into this book! That's the real mark of a good book to me. It also kept me wanting to return to this world, because the characters and tech were all quite interesting.

Bedford's universe and ‘tech were a really good blend. She didn't go overboard in the creation and she never bogs us down with too much hard sci-fi. Basically her expansion of humans ran somewhat similar to a franchise like BattleTech. It's really humans expanding into space with their technology. There are no alien species being encountered, instead it's just humans and their ill-formed political systems being hampered by Megacorporations. She definitely takes a piece of these ideas from the Cyberpunk genre along with the neural implants that she needs, and just expands humans into the universe. She creates a scenario where the space ships can jump through the folds of space, which is nothing new at all, but there is a hint at a bit of a mystery to what the folds are and what happens in them. I'm hoping that she tugs on this thread a bit and we get an interesting reveal by the end of the trilogy.

Empire of Dust brings us the story of Cara Carlinni and Ben Benjamin, his first name isn't really Ben, it's his nickname. Having that be his actual first name would have been rather ridiculous and I probably would have had a hard time taking the book seriously. Cara and Ben cross paths in a rather chance encounter, which launches our tale into the stratosphere to space opera proportions. At first the story felt like it would be more about Cara, but then Cara gets caught up in Ben's world, then it felt like it was more about him. Ben is sort of a retired soldier, but gets caught up in one more mission to help a group of settlers move to a new planet. Amidst all this the story shifts and starts to be about Cara again, because her past begins to catch up with her at this point. The way Bedford moved around these two characters was so well done, because they're both the main character equally. As someone who massively enjoys the power couple story, Bedford is absolutely delivering it. I loved this aspect of the story more than anything else. Cara isn't some Damsel in distress that Ben needs to save all the time, no, sometimes Ben needs saving and Cara is there to save him! They definitely trade off these sort of details and it was a very enjoyable ride. The fact that Bedford brings us characters with real depth makes it all the more enjoyable.

I, honestly, can't praise this novel enough and the fact that I remember so much of the story two years later is a true testament to how good this book was. I really look forward to diving into Ben and Cara's world again in the next novel! Even if I read these years a part, it's on purpose, because I know this story will end eventually so I want to parse it out slowly. If you like space opera styled sci-fi this is an excellent trilogy to dive into. Highly recommended.

Really a 3.5

I've read all the prior Aliens books and I've enjoyed all of them quite a bit, including this one. After the first Trilogy Dark Horse took novelizing comic book series they released. However, the last book published “Berserker” was published in 1998, so it's been quite a few years since Dark Horse returned to publishing novels in the Aliens series. I was pretty excited to see new novels being published and I was even happier to see they were original stories. These are more than just a round of novelized comic books, they are entirely new adventures.

“Original Sin,” despite being written many years after the fact, picks up where Alien: Resurrection left off. This is sort of the adventures of Ripley, Call, Johner and Vreiss the survivors of the movie. In this story Michael Jan Friedman takes us on a jaunt through space where Ripley fights against a shadow organization that is working with the creators of the Aliens. This time they plan to save a biodome in deep space that has been sent an Alien egg. As you can expect, disaster ensues. Michael Jan Friedman keeps the action and terror going throughout the entirety of the book and sifts in tidbits of corporate intrigue similar to themes found in the Dark Horse comics published in the 90's. His cast of characters are pretty good and he writes them well enough in such a short action packed novel.

Basically, if you're a fan of the Aliens franchise I think Michael Jan Friedman did a good job working within the realms of the lore of the series. I, personally, thought Alien: Resurrection was a great movie, until the Alien queen gave birth to a new creature with a human womb. Frankly, that was just stupid. Friedman stays away from anything so ridiculous and instead gives us an Alien variant that feels a bit more plausible.

I think Friedman clearly planned to potentially write more stories with the way this ended and allusions to fighting the shadow organization in the future. But it's 2020 now and I'm not sure he'll get the chance to write that follow-up. After looking at the backs of the novels after this, they don't appear to have anything to do with what Friedman wrote here. That's sort of the downfall of this books end... it ends with you wanting more, but in true Alien fashion they hire someone else to take on the next adventure and it probably has nothing to do with what was written before... Honestly, that's a plight of this franchise, regardless of how much I enjoy it.

Probably closer to a 2.5 for me.

Even though I found “Nova” in the Sci-Fi section of the bookstore this reads far more like a Young Adult novel and that's probably where it hit a downside for me. I, honestly, don't know why this wasn't put into that section, but I am extremely picky when it comes to YA books. A lot of times I can find them to be fairly tedious reads for some reason.

When I read the back of the books description this book sounded pretty awesome and exactly the type of book I might enjoy. But then the pacing of the book was extremely slow. Now, I can always get behind a solid kick ass female lead, especially when they're well written and realistic. But books that focus a bit more on a coming of age story centered around teenagers can be really boring for me. Huge amounts of time is spent on repetitive feelings and questioning whether or not they like someone in a particular relationship. This is true whether we're focused on male or female teenage characters to be perfectly honest. Teenagers don't have much life experience, so they tend to dwell on the same things over and over, and while that's realistic, it's boring to read about. It's somewhat a trap of the YA genre, which is why I felt this book belonged there more. Instead of a book about a secret war being waged, “Nova” spends a solid chunk of the book exploring the relationship between Lia and Michael. It's a pretty standard fair teenage romance most of the time just cast on a space station, and includes a bit of the tried and true amnesia type mechanic where a character has to “relearn” their past.

Now, outside all of this the story is fairly awesome. The whole war concept is great and the reveals at the end of the book are surprising and very cool. I just wish they could have gotten on with it and gotten to the war aspect more quickly. I really could have done without the whole sticking the needle in the eye scene... which I skipped, but it took up nearly two pages. No thanks. This is probably singly why this book was not in the YA section.

So, if all the stuff I didn't like is a total feature for you then check this book out. It's well written and it does have some serious cliff hanger moments that make you want to read the next chapter. I have absolutely nothing bad to say about Margaret Fortune's world building or concepts and perhaps future books by her will get more streamlined.

This is the third installment of these really wonderful cat mystery books, as I like to call them. In this installment Qwill and Koko team up to solve murders in a section of the city called “Junktown”, but in reality it's just a collection of Antique dealers. Lilian Jackson Braun does an excellent job in crafting a fairly traditional “who-done-it” type of mystery. I think she's really settled into hear style by the third installment.

However, the main motivator for the three stories is built around Qwill needing to move to a new location. So, he seems to move around a lot and at this point I'm wondering if he's ever just going to settle into one location and force Braun to come up with a different way to bring the mysteries to us. Either way, she uses this as an excuse to get to know a whole host of new characters. It does sort of make sense because Qwill is a newspaper man, not a detective like Sherlock Holmes, so people aren't going to seek out his detective services... especially detective services that require some feline assistance!

Either way, I find these stories so fun to read. They are practically the ultimate in wholesome storytelling in the realms of murder mystery novels at least. This is also the first book where we have the new cat Yumyum. In the second installment Qwill wound up caring for an entirely new cat to pair up with Koko and, unfortunately, Yumyum isn't the mystery solver Koko is...she's more of a scaredy cat that isn't nearly as intelligent. But she does bring some fun and enjoyable dynamics to the household, I just hope that throughout the series Qwill isn't constantly acquiring residences and new animals. Only time will tell though... if you've enjoyed the first two installments of this series, you'll enjoy this one as well.

I had a really hard time getting through this book. Firstly, let me say that I read “The Da Vinci Code” first and I really enjoyed that book. However, “Angels & Demons” didn't really measure up at all by comparison. The first book isn't always the best, but I wasn't expecting it to be this much of a challenge to get through.

In “Angels & Demons” I feel like Brown created Robert Langdon to be a character that was sort of a less exciting Indiana Jones blended with James Bond. Instead of trying to write exciting passages Brown focused more on the historical mystery in an overly detailed manner. The constant detail grew extremely tedious after a while. I think Brown could have easily shaved 150 pages off of this book and it would have been ten times more interesting to read.

I think if you're really interested in the mysteries surrounding the Catholic Church, perhaps you can find some merit in the book. Brown tries to take a page out of Crichton's style with making it a bit of a techno-thriller crossing paths with ancient mystery, but I found the material a slog to get through. I will say that “The Da Vinci Code” did not have a lot of these problems, so if you're just delving into this character I would, honestly, start there.

I absolutely adored the first book, [b:The Cat Who Could Read Backwards 508903 The Cat Who Could Read Backwards (Cat Who..., #1) Lilian Jackson Braun https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1298562424l/508903.SY75.jpg 1469462], so I was eager to delve into the second as soon as I had a chance. Braun certainly hasn't lost her touch in creating mysteries staring Qwill and Koko.The interesting thing with this book is that with Qwill shaking up the local art scene so much, he was moved onto a different newspaper assignment. This time he's been assigned to the Interior Decorating column, still a far cry where Qwill really wants to be with the crime beat. But, as usual, he tries to make the assignment work and Koko finds his own unique ways to help. And as usual, despite not being on the crime beat, he stumbles his way into a murder mystery just like the last novel! Now, it's up to him and Koko to solve this mystery. I really do love Braun's novels and writing, because even with this second time she crafts a wholesome and entertaining story. If you enjoyed the first book, you will certainly enjoy this sequel. It doesn't feel overly repetitive, and instead just feels like another adventure. Similar to the fashion of Sherlock Holmes, where the stories were just great adventures and stories. The surprising thing in this book is that Qwill finds another addition to his family in this book, which changes the course of the series after this quite a bit. However, makes them all the more enjoyable!

Kind of bounces around a 3 and 4 to settle comfortably in the 3.5 range.

This is an extremely cute and short yuri slice of life story. This is really the story of two friends who were separated as kids, Koharu and Mafuyu, but then are re-united in high school. This being a yuri they find out their feelings transcend friendship and it's all very light hearted and nice. So, if you're looking for a quick read with almost no drama this is a pretty nice and relaxing read.

However, this lack of drama, the more natural relationship building between new friends and old could be kind of boring for some people. To some degree the story does feel like it lacks greater “depth” or “substance”, but I think a lot of that has to do with how short the series is. We go from being introduced to this group of four girls to mutual interest in a relationship in a mere three volumes. It feels rushed compared to other manga some people read that is overly drawn out... see some of the things that happen in manga like “Kimi Ni Todoke” (which is an AWESOME shojo in my opinion). However, none the “questioning” phase of the characters attracted to each other is fairly short lived by comparison, and let's face it, probably a bit more realistic, because only after a few months they're together. Which makes a lot of sense for two people that already knew each other!

In the end this is a cute and fast paced story (for a slice of life that is). There isn't much in the way of dramatic conflict or big shocking reveals. I'm actually surprised at how quickly this story wrapped up and I was expecting a bit of a slow paced build up, but alas we are only with these characters for a short time.

This was the first book I ever read in this cute series that I've decided to call “Cat Mystery Books,” and as I read the book it became painfully clear that I needed to go back and read the first books if I was going to have more context of the characters. Now, each novel is a self contained mystery, but there is a bit of an over-arching story with recurring characters, and especially in the sense that we follow Qwill and his cats around. Well, it's safe to say I am glad I started this series from the beginning and now fully understand the context in which Qwill's life is going.

Here our main character has fully moved into the town of Pick Axe and brought the feline friends to explore their new big house. As Qwill starts to arrange his new life by calling in some old friends from “down below” to help around the house. Mrs. Cobb returns to take a job as house keeper. His friend Arch Riker comes to visit once in a while, so we do get to hear from some recurring characters. However, in addition to these returning friends, we have a quite a new cast of characters to meet. As usual some are far more mysterious than the others, but we get to know Qwill's new girlfriend Melinda Goodwinter a lot better in this novel. I rather like her and am curious to see if she'll be around for longer than the single novel. I feel like Braun started off with a bit of the James Bond feel for Qwill, resulting in a new girlfriend in each novel, but now it seems that she has returned to writing, maybe Qwill will settle into a more stable life. Well... as stable as possible for a man solving mysteries with the help of Koko that is.

In this novel as Qwill is exploring his new domicile he finds the whole mansion overwhelming to take in. So, he finds smaller rooms above the garage that would be much more to his liking, rather than living in total opulence. While looking over those rooms he comes across one that used to be occupied by a young girl that was employed there years ago. Qwill comes to find out that the girl suddenly disappeared, and Koko is rather overly interested in the case of this missing person. Past experience has taught Qwill to trust Koko's instincts and begins asking questions about this girl's past. Naturally, as we can guess from the series, foul play was involved and a small town murder mystery comes back to the forefront!

As far as mysteries go, I thought this one was one of the better in the series so far. Some of the others felt rather abrupt and involved villains you rarely ever met. In this novel you get to meet a few of the people involved in the mystery, so it's real case of “who done it,” which made for an exciting read. If you've been reading the series up until now, you will certainly not be disappointed in this mystery.

I really liked the antics of Koko and Yumyum, their whole fascination with the mail delivery and running around with the letters was wonderful. It reminded me of a situation with my own cats where I had a rather playful cat named Tony and one time I had a bunch of papers spread out on the floor because I was organizing something and what did he do? He ran through the papers and started playing with them. Batting them around and carrying them off. So, it was fun to think about the two cats running around with the letters.