White Fire: My Review

From Goodreads

Special Agent Pendergast arrives at an exclusive Colorado ski resort to rescue his protégée, Corrie Swanson, from serious trouble with the law. His sudden appearance coincides with the first attack of a murderous arsonist who--with brutal precision--begins burning down multimillion-dollar mansions with the families locked inside. After springing Corrie from jail, Pendergast learns she made a discovery while examining the bones of several miners who were killed 150 years earlier by a rogue grizzly bear. Her finding is so astonishing that it, even more than the arsonist, threatens the resort's very existence.

Drawn deeper into the investigation, Pendergast uncovers a mysterious connection between the dead miners and a fabled, long-lost Sherlock Holmes story--one that might just offer the key to the modern day killings as well.

Now, with the ski resort snowed in and under savage attack--and Corrie's life suddenly in grave danger--Pendergast must solve the enigma of the past before the town of the present goes up in flames.

This is the thirteenth(!) Pendergast book from Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. I first came to this series when I was in high school and discovered Relic, the first of the Pendergast books, and proceeded to devour it and the sequels that had been released up to that point. While thrillers and mysteries  are no longer my go to genres like they were in high school, I still get excited every time there is a new Pendergast release and it is a given that it will be added to my TBR list.

One of my jobs is working for a snake breeder and due to the nature of the work I am doing, I pretty much always have my earbuds in listening to either music, podcasts, or audiobooks. It is amazing how much better I can concentrate on the task at hand and how much quicker I work when I can tune out everything else except what I am listening to and what I am working on. Through trial and error I have found what sort of audiobooks work best for me while working and what doesn’t and White Fire was great.

The book was narrated by Rene Auberjonois and while I thought he was great with all the male character’s voices, I was at first thrown by some of the female character’s voices, particularly Corrie’s. Eventually I grew used to it and stopped being thrown out of the story, but it was a little rough going at first. Other than that, I really have no complaint regarding the narration. I thought he did great for Pendergast and I particularly enjoyed the parts of the book that flashed back to Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle.

As for the story itself, I really enjoyed the historical mystery and the way it was woven in to the present day. While I totally called the baddie, I didn’t know what his motivations were until the reveal, so it still had plenty of surprising twists and turns. I’m glad this time around we got to spend more time with Corrie. While she made some terrible, TERRIBLE decisions, I feel that she has come very far from the girl who was first introduced in Still Life with Crows (Pendergast #4) and it’s cool to see her growing up. This novel works pretty well as a standalone, and while you don’t have to have read all of the previous Pendergast books to enjoy this one, I feel like you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t because Pendergast is AWESOME.

Broken Homes: My Review

Partially due to my inability to come up with a semi-coherent summary, but mostly due to my laziness, I have decided to use the Goodreads summary for this review. There is a VERY good chance that I will continue to do so in future reviews.

From Goodreads (and I suspect the jacket copy)

My name is Peter Grant, and I am a keeper of the secret flame -- whatever that is.

Truth be told, there's a lot I still don't know. My superior Nightingale, previously the last of England's wizardly governmental force, is trying to teach me proper schooling for a magician's apprentice. But even he doesn't have all the answers. Mostly I'm just a constable sworn to enforce the Queen’s Peace, with the occasional help from some unusual friends and a well-placed fire blast. With the new year, I have three main objectives, a) pass the detective exam so I can officially become a DC, b) work out what the hell my relationship with Lesley May, an old friend from the force and now fellow apprentice, is supposed to be, and most importantly, c) get through the year without destroying a major landmark.

Two out of three isn’t bad, right?

A mutilated body in Crawley means another murderer is on the loose. The prime suspect is one Robert Weil, who may either be a common serial killer or an associate of the twisted magician known as the Faceless Man -- a man whose previous encounters I've barely survived. I've also got a case about a town planner going under a tube train and another about a stolen grimoire.

But then I get word of something very odd happening in Elephant and Castle, on a housing estate designed by a nutter, built by charlatans, and inhabited by the truly desperate. If there's a connection to the Crawley case, I'll be entering some tricky waters of juristiction with the local river spirits. We have a prickly history, to say the least.

Just the typical day for a magician constable.

One of the things I find most interesting when it comes to the books we read is, why we chose to read them. In this case, Broken Homes is the fourth book in the Peter Grant series and I’m reading this because I read and enjoyed the first three, but that doesn’t really explain the why.

I first came to this series when I came across Whispers Under Ground while browsing the book section at Walmart. In general, the book section of Walmart is not exactly known for its variety and unparalleled selection, but in this case I discovered something new to me. The cover is what initially caught my eye. I absolutely love the artwork on these books and when I saw that the book series is basically (insert your favorite police procedural) + MAGIC!!! I was sold. I bought it, read it, and loved it.

If you are at all familiar with this series, you are wondering why on earth I started with the third book. The very simple answer to your question is, because I didn’t realize it was a series until I had almost finished reading. After I finished it, I gobbled down the first two books. However, if I had come across the other books first, there is a very good chance I never would have given them a second glance. Why? Because the cover were ugly.

OK, so they aren’t that bad, but they are nowhere near as visually appealing as the other covers and I am glad to say the first two books have since been rereleased with pretty covers (I think the pretty covers might have been the British covers originally). So anyways, I started with book three, then read books one and two, and that brings me to the subject of this review, book four, Broken Homes.

I am having some SERIOUSLY conflicted emotions on what to say about this book. On one hand, it is a new Peter Grant story, I love this series, and I really like Ben Aaronovitch’s writing. BUT, to be honest,  I felt a little let down by this installment. I feel like in previous books, Aaronovitch did a much better job of writing a story, that while it was a piece of the greater story arc, each one was also a complete story with a definite beginning, middle, and end of its own. I felt this book introduced a whole bunch of potential plots, but didn’t really go anywhere with most of them before it was introducing something else. Ninety percent of the book felt like set up and then all of the sudden it’s the end of the book, there is a MAJOR cliffhanger, and zero percent resolution to anything that happened thus far.

When it comes to the writing, Aaronovitch continues to be as entertaining as ever.  Peter is delightfully snarky, constantly peppering everything he says with geeky observations that reveal how he isn’t quite as cool as he’d like to think. As for the rest of the characters, they are wonderfully multi-dimensional in ways that supporting characters don’t always get to be portrayed. One of the things that I love most about this series is how matter of fact it is about the diversity of all the characters. This is not a book with an entirely white or vaguely, unidentifiably ethnic cast of characters. The character’s ethnicities are important and relevant to the story, but in a seamlessly organic way that never veers into tokenism.

While this series can be a bit of a mixed bag, overall I feel it is worth a read if you are looking for a fun, humorous urban fantasy. But please, learn from my mistakes and read it in the proper order.

 

Hello Internets!

Way back towards the end of December, when I was doing my New Year’s Resoluting, I decided that one of my goals for 2014 would be to start a book blog. I thought to myself, “This will be awesome, I'll still be able to read all of the books, AND I’ll also be working on my goal of writing more, so win-win. Piece of cake.” Then I proceeded to read a ton of books and write amazing reviews for all of them.

 Haha, just kidding! What actually happened, was I gave myself a ginormous case of writers block, with a bonus round of the  inability to focus on anything I tried to read. The result was I was not reading all of the books like I thought I would (in fact, I was reading none of the books), but finally (mainly due to membership in a couple of book clubs) I actually managed to finish reading some books.

 It was great. I read a book, Plain Kate by Erin Bow, which I really loved, we had a great discussion about it at our Saturday night book club meeting, and I was planning on writing up my first review sometime the following week. Well, I never got around to writing that review, because that Tuesday, my mother died.

 I am not exaggerating at all when I say that it felt like the bottom dropped out of my world. Reviewing and even reading books suddenly became the furthest thing from my mind. I’ve barely had the attention span to read a book, much less write about how I felt about it.

It has now been about a month since my mom’s death and while my world is still topsy-turvy, the mundane day to day tasks still have to be done, and so, since I have returned to work and returned to my normal daily activities, I have decided that it is time to attempt the blog thing.

 Now because some time has passed since I read Plain Kate and I don’t feel I could give it the justice it deserves, I am no longer planning on that being my first review. However, I will say, if you enjoy a good, dark, old-world fantasy, you should definitely give it a chance because it is really great.

 So long story short, this is my blog. Welcome to it! I’m going to read some things and attempt to write about them here. I’m scared and excited and I hope you’ll join me on my bookish journey.