Scent of Death by Andrew Taylor...a review

The Scent of Death by Andrew  Taylor

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


When London clerk Edward Savill sails into New York harbor on August 2, 1778, heh is not impressed. “I confess I expected a finer prospect,” he comments to a sailor keeping him company, “Something more like a city.” The British are occupying the city and like his cabin mate, Mr. Noak—an American who has been working in London for years—Savill is traveling on business. England and the United States may be at war, but war is good for business and opportunities for getting rich are everywhere. And in this atmosphere, everything is for sale, as Noak notes cynically. “For some people, sir, loyalty is a commodity, and like any other may be bought and sold.”

Margaret Atwood rewrites The Tempest

What can I say but "I can't wait to read this." It's on offer as an Early Reviewer copy at Library Thing, so of course, I signed up for it, along with 308 other people who are vying for 20 copies. Wish me luck!

THE HATCHING by Ezekial Boone... a review

An international disaster ensues when a strange species of spiders suddenly hatches in Peru and China simultaneously. This new novel by Ezekial Boone is old school and intense!  Who doesn't hate spiders?

Miguel was born in Lima, Peru, a city of seven million, but to stay close to a girlfriend he’s found a job leading “eco tours” into the jungle. His latest trip has been kind of a disaster because he hasn’t spotted any animals at all. His clients are complaining but Miguel is spooked. And then a bird simply falls out of the sky, And then the wave of spiders overwhelms one of the tourists in his party.  That’s a terrific way to begin a disaster story and the pace only picks up from there as we meet a beleaguered FBI agent in the US, a baffled seismologist in India, and a smart and tough spider expert who has a theory that the SPIDER glyph scratched in the Nazca plains of Peru is older than the other images there. And meanwhile…China sets off a nuke in its own interior.  This is a lot of fun, and it’s the start of a trilogy, so there’s more fun to come.

           

           

TBR: Duane Swierczynski's Canary

I am a big, big fan of DS and have been all the way back to his days on Details Magazine. I can't remember the first piece of fiction of his I read. It was probably Expiration Date. I am thrilled he's got a new book out (or at least new to me, I've had my head down for the last 18 months or so. This is definitely one for the TBR bookcase.

Not super crazy about the Canary cover though. Even though the book is from a traditional publisher, this looks kind of like a cover that an author with basic Photoshop skills came up with himself. It IS eye-catching and looks great as a thumbnail, so from a marketing standpoint it works, but the writer's writing is so good, I want the whole package to be great.

Two Actors, Four Movies that got Journalism right

I've just watched Spotlight and Truth back to back and both of them were intense and realistic and Sixty Minutes, no television news show had ever been profitable--and in Spotlight, the shadow of the internet hangs over the newspaper office -- literally. I used to be a reporter, starting off as a magazine writer and then becoming a freelance cityside reporter for an L.A. weekly paper, then freelancing for a a syndicated news service. I rarely wrote hard news but I took my job seriously and i did it with pride. My Great-Aunt Marie had worked for a Chicago paper during WWII and when she came home from the night shift, she noticed that one of her neighbors was always up and talking to someone who wasn't there. She did some investigating and then had a chat with the FBI, who arrested the guy. He was a member of the German-American Bund and he was broadcasting on a radio.  Yes, my newspaperwoman great-aunt caught a Germany spy!!!
well-done. Both of them are about the financial realities of news organizations--before

I grew up in a house where we read two papers every day, the Washington Post in the morning and the Evening Star at night. I don't even know if the Evening Star is still being published--afternoon papers were starting to die even when I was in  high school. On Sundays, my father would drive down to the bus station and pick up copies of the out of town papers.  So newsprint is in my blood and even though I've long since left the newsgatherine world behind, I'm still a news junkie.  And I love movies about journalists. I have a pretty short list of favorite movies in that genre and oddly, Robert Redford is in two of them and Michael Keaton is in the other two.

All the President's Men is a still my favorite of the four movies. It's beautifully acted, beautifully cast, written by the great William Goldman and directed by Alan J. Pakula.  the movie came out 40 years

The Fourth Sense is WIDE!!

Up until now I've been in Kindle Select with all my books written under all my pen names. But since the advent of "unlimited reads," my sales have just taken a nosedive. I decided to try my fortunes going wide using Draft2Digital to format my books for all the platforms. I'm leading with The Fourth Sense, an award-winning novelette, the first in a four-part series that combines a little bit of romance, a little bit of paranormal, and a little bit of suspense. (There are no werewolves or vampires here.) You can now find it on Amazon, Kobo, Scribd, and more coming soon!!! It's just 99 cents at the moment, so why not pick up a copy?? And perhaps leave a review??

Vampire Girl by Karpov Kinrade...a review

“I didn’t expect beauty. I didn’t expect magic. I didn’t expect love,” the Vampire Girl book trailer says. I didn’t expect any of that and to be honest, I didn’t really expect that good a book. (And you know what I means—some of the best-selling vampire books out there are barely readable.) But Vampire Girl by Karpov Kinrade (a husband/wife writing team) kept coming up on my “Also Purchased” and “Recommended” reading lists so I finally took the hint and bought the book.

And wow. Just … wow. 

Vampire Girl is a great read. The writers have given us a wonderfully relatable heroine, a blue collar girl who dreams of being a lawyer and works in a diner and worries about paying the bills. She lives in Portland, Oregon and her life is filled with friends, including her best friend, a transwoman whose boyfriend has a bit of the second sight. The book is written in a cinematic style with cliff-hangers ending each chapter and mysteries that pull us through to the next bit.