​    I enjoy Brash publishers. They make interesting selections, combing through the past to bring old forgotten stories back to life and to readers. They also are very kind to their subscribers, providing them with free copies. So that’s how I ended up reading John Sanford. An author I’ve never heard of. An author I wouldn’t have normally been all that interested in, probably. Or, more specifically, the type of fiction I wouldn’t normally be all that interested in. The aggressively violent desperate man doing aggressively violent desperate things to each other, courtesy of the post WWI Great Depression zeitgeist in the US. I’ve not read much from that time, outside of James M. Cain. And so naturally that would be a comparison sample. And no, I don’t think Sanford is in Cain’s league. Close, but, you know, no cigar.
   Then again Sanford’s writing is darker, almost frighteningly so. The man descends into a proper abyss to dream up the town of Warrensburg, it’s denizens and all that takes place there. This is the opposite of quiet desperation, this is the loud, violent kind.
   And so here is a tale of three WWI veterans out of work and out of place with the world, who go to stay with one of the trio’s fathers at the eponymous old man’s place, drinking and spiraling out of control until a naïve mail order bride’s arrival provides a catalyst for the already dangerous situation.
   To the author’s credit, for a man from a fairly privileged Manhattan upbringing, trained as a lawyer, Sanford is alarmingly adept at tapping into the toxic masculinity of its day his characters exhibit and are driven by. And he is a first rate character writer. It’s a pretty good story all around, but you have to have a pretty strong stomach to enjoy this sort of thing. The visceral violence alone…It was actually a recurring theme for Sanford, who has often drew parallels between America’s violent origin story and its subsequent national character. There’s also a parallel between Warrensburg and US at large, with the former essentially standing in as a microcosm of the latter.
   All of that is even more prevalent in the second Warrensgburg trilogy and, if you’re interested, I’m also reviewing that one.
   So I don’t know if I enjoyed this book, I appreciate it, but enjoyment is a different thing altogether. There’s something appealingly edifying about the way it conveys the spirit of the time. Not an easy read by any means, but an interesting one. And welcomingly succinct, it would have been difficult to read a book like that for much longer.
   Also, what’s the use of living remotely if you can’t get rid of the dead body? Seriously? Just bury it and says the person left, instead of confessing and throwing one’s life away. Just seems like a waste.
   Sanford wasn’t a very popular writer in his time and I’m not sure Brash is going to change that, unless there’s a new noir market boom out there. But it’s ambitious of them to try. There are barely any readers reviews for his books, which, considering how long they’ve been around, is fairly telling. So here’s mine, for whatever its worth. Many thanks to Brash publishers.

​Privacy is dead. Cassie Woodson is just shoveling the earth onto its casket. 
    Reimagining You from a female perspective and setting the book in a (very familiar to the author) world of corporate law, this is the thriller to make you paranoid about what you put in your emails.
    You never know who might read those and sometimes just one look is enough to destroy a life. 
Cassie Woodson is on a downward spiral, her father died and some initially unspecified occurrence at her former law office has resulted in her singleness, very public firing and a subsequent media infamy. Now she is drinking her meals and plodding away at a soul devastating temp job. And then…ta da.. a bright light. In a form of a perfect couple, Forest and Annabelle Watts, whose loving email exchanges she ends up reading. The admiration quickly gives way to obsession and soon it isn’t enough to just read and dream, soon Cassie decides to actually go for it. To steal her perfect man Cassie will need to become his perfect woman…Annabelle. A prohibitively expensive and challenging task, btu hey, that’s what credit cards are for. The rest is a different manner altogether, good thing Cassie is so adept at lying, because a tangled web of lies she has to weave indeed. One that’s all to easy to get tripped up in. 
     So You it isn’t. But then again it doesn’t need to be, it has all the right elements to get published and thrive in the current thriller obsessed market anyway. And much like You it does have a certain compulsive reading quality to it. The thing is Cassie’s no Joe Goldberg, she’s just a mess, she doesn’t have a certain psychopathic charisma and she doesn’t get likeable or at least easier to understand until much later in the novel. Much like in You the social connotations are very front and center here, the dangers of social media, the obscene amounts of personal information people so stupidly present to the world, it isn’t as wryly done as in You, but it’s there. There’s also an added bonus in a way of a mystery, a corporate law/potential murder mystery, just so you can get a nice genre prerequisite plot twist in the end. 
     Maybe I’m doing this book a disservice by comparing it to the oh so excellent You. Shall we do The Fatal Attraction instead? Ok, here you go, Just One Look is The Fatal Attraction for the modern age. Thriller fans who prefer their protagonists on the less likable thoroughly unhinged side and their romance tinged with obsession should enjoy this one. Thanks Netgalley.

​  There has been a plethora of Stan Lee’s bios to choose from since his passing. The main reason Is elected this was its brevity. I figured 192 pages should tell me just enough about The Man and Marvel. And it actually did just that. It was very informative, accessible and fun, obviously well researched and fascinating, but…biased. Granted I’m not a frequent biography readers, but the ones I’ve read have all been either neutral or very fond of their subjects. Not the case here. In fact, from the beginning the author seems downright contemptuous of his subject and frequently throughout the book he chose to go with the worst possible explanation of a situation or a behavior.
   It didn’t color my opinion of Stan Lee overall, because I’m a huge fan and have a tremendous amount of respect for The man, his talent, his legend and his legacy. Just wasn’t sure the author shared that. At any rate, it didn’t preclude him from being able to present facts of life and doing so in a fun and engaging manner…second reason I chose this bio was Mackinder’s past comedic career, figured it’d be a fun read. It was. Also, opinionated.
    Jack Kirby, another Marvel luminary, was presented in a surprisingly kind light, considering the amount of nastiness he has spewed Lee’s way over the years. In fact, it’s kind of amazing the two have ever managed to work together, let alone for so long. Toward the end of his life Kirby has bitterly accused Lee of all sorts of things, Trumpstyle blatant untruths about easily verifiable facts. But anyway…Lee was in business for ages, has been essential in making Marvel the powerhouse it became, however that trajectory has ebbed and flowed over the years. The two are inseparable with Stan Lee having been the face and image of the company for decades. You don’t get to a place like that without stepping on some toes, without resorting to some shameless self promotion (something the author of this book seems especially begrudging about).  
   And the thing is it doesn’t really matter, not in the grand scheme of things. Spoken like a fan? Sure. Why wouldn’t you be one? Stan Lee was the embodiment of the American Dream, a son of impoverish Eastern European Jewish immigrants who attainted success in every possible measure. A talented writer, a wily promoter, an intuitive businessman, an imaginative luminary, a devoted family man and eventually a very, very wealthy one. Stan Lee created legends and in the end became one.
   Nothing in the book has made me admire The Man any less, despite the author’s occasionally snippy tone. Plus I learned a bunch of things about Lee and Marvel and the comic industry in general, from bitter rivalries to grand successes. These days Marvel Cinematic Universe has made the entire world aware of Lee’s (and others’) creations. I’m not actually a huge fan of traditional superhero comics, but some things are just impossible not to appreciate, if only for their tremendous entertainment value. And so In loved the behind the scenes look at the origin stories of some of the greatest, greenest, grandiose, gravity defying and grooviest gangbusters out there. That attempt at grandiloquence was to honor Stan Lee, the alliteration king par excellence.
   Overall, this was a very enjoyable read. The infusion of author’s personality might work to a different degree for different readers, but the stories within these book are too great to fail, irrespective of perspectives. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

     In theory not every cult is a commune and not every commune is a cult, but in reality the difference between the two can be minute enough to vanish into details and semantics. Which worked for me, because this is technically a novel about a commune, but one that certainly seems like a cult. And I do love a good cult story.
     Pastoral is the idyllic lifestyle of those disenchanted with mainstream life. Pastoral is a word whispered by a mother of a missing daughter to the man hired to find her. Pastoral is a place conceived with the best of intentions in the 1970s when such things were in vogue, a commune of likeminded individuals intent on living a simpler life away from the loud world. In this novel all the roads lead to Pastoral. It’s the getting out that’s difficult.
    So once upon a time a man named Theo was hired to find a woman named Maggie St. James. Theo, singularly qualified for the task, is a psychic, able to find a trail when all others have given up. It has been five years, after all. Maggie had her reasons for vanishing, her popular line of children’s book deemed too dark by many has apparently inspired some violence, there was a certain level of infamy one might want to get away from. Theo traces Maggie to Pastoral’s boundary, a place that has given no evidence of existing for ages and then…fade to black.
    Come into the light and zoom in on Pastoral. Still very much in existence, albeit much, much has changed since the passing of the original leader. From here on out it’s pretty much a fictionalized account of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, an out of time community terrified of the woods surrounding them. The main characters in these chapters are Travis and Calla, integral members of the community who begin to ask questions and challenge the new leader and the new order of things. A dangerous thing to do in general and especially in a cult. And you know what they say about matches and fire.
    So that’s essentially the novel. I do hope I’ve made it sound interesting, because it is, but you know how I said I love a good cult story…where here’s why this isn’t a great one. The book is the author’s adult debut and had I not known this, I might have guessed it. There’s something about the writing that reads like upgraded YA. The contents are perfectly adult, but the writing itself…the short sentences, the repetitions for emphasis, the hyperbolic quality, the way every other statement is made to sound like a revelation and a certain hyped up dramatic quality. AM I explaining this right? Essentially it reads like every other line is an exclamation. You know, like a certain terrible texting technique that seems so popular. And the thing is the story is dramatic enough without any of it. There’s basically just a surplus of emphasis.
   Also…don’t read the next paragraph if you haven’t read the book.
Also, the use of hypnotic powers is done as if by someone who learned all about it from watching Now You See Me movies. I mean, it just doesn’t work like that, it isn’t magic. Then again, the novel presupposes psychic powers, so why not this too.
    Ok, we’re back. So anyway, not a perfect novel, but a perfectly good one. I was entertained, I liked the twist, however credulity testing it might have been. I liked the ending too. So yeah, this was a fun read. Ideally in the future the author will tone down the hyperexcited narrative thing. Anyone interested in cults/communes is going to want to check this out too. Thanks Netgalley.

I went into this somewhat apprehensively due to some underwhelming reviews. And what do you know…a pleasant surprise. Way to manage expectations, me.
It seems the consensus with those underwhelming reviews is the unlikeable protagonist and sure enough he is at the very least a scoundrel. A 25 year old deadbeat with a short trigger and unimpressive resume he gets clued in on a job far outside of his skills and talents and, desperate for money, applies and gets it. Turns out it’s a job he is indeed specifically suited for, only not in a way he ever expected.
Now he’s a caretaker for an elderly brother and sister, who live in a dilapidated mansion in a wrong area of town, a pair that once upon a time were famous magicians (the advertising poster of the Walgraves prefacing the book was a nice trick, definitely grabbed my attention) and now are being slowly beaten down by old age. They have money (lots of it) and friends (a Redevine social club they belong to), but in the end of the day they have…other needs.
And a handsome, greedy and not all that bright albeit accommodating Mr. Norman might just meet those needs.
To be fair, I understand the importance of a likeable protagonist, it’s usually very important for my enjoyment of the book, but every so often it just doesn’t matter or the book doesn’t need one. Not if it’s a book about nasty people taking advantage of one another. So this one worked for me just as it was, amoral all around. It might even be read as a morality story on greed, since greed in various shapes and forms is the main motivator for most of the cast of these reprehensibles.
Also, the writing’s quite good. I’ve never read the author or, since she is pseudonymed, I don’t think so, but it’s fun and atmospheric and dark in all the right ways and has some nicely realized creepiness. It is, after all, a scary story, and it does what it’s supposed to, nightmarishly so.
There isn’t ton of suspense in the narrative, it’s very easy to figure out what’s going on pretty quickly, though for the protagonist who is up to his shoulders in it and has no outside omnipotent perspective that the readers do, it’s all pretty freaking surprising, stunning and deadly. So it’s one of those stories, you know what’s up and you watch the characters get clued in. At least that’s how it read for me. But it read well, surprisingly so for a random genre book from an unknown author. And yes, the general idea behind it isn’t a most original one, it’s been done many times before, but it was done nicely here and the magician thing was a nice twisted cherry on top. So I say abandon your conventional character likability presets and enjoy the ride. The Walgraves are just dying to meet you. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

I've been reading Bell for a while now. In fact, probably read every single book he’s written. They’ve been somewhat uneven, quality wise, but mostly good. So I requested his new one right as it showed up on Netgalley without hesitating and sure enough, it’s one from the mostly (more on this in detail later) good category.
This book from its clever literary title to the contents was very much a write what you know sort of thing. The main protagonist is an English professor in a small Kentucky college in a small Kentucky town, much like the author. White, middle class, middle aged…and let’s hope that’s where the similarities end, because he’s also a barely coping widower, semi functional depressed drunk (though working on that) and unable to write a single creative word. That’s Connor Nye’s life, sort of floundering.
Unable to secure tenure due to inability to publish and desperate, he does something immoral, but reasonable…plagiarism. Takes a manuscript of a missing young woman he used to teach and publishes it as his own. It’s good, certainly more so than any book Connor of his university buddies has written. Good enough to get attention and in this case all kinds of wrong attention. First, from the missing young woman, who is very much alive, back and wants her cut. Second, from the cops, because the murder described in a book all too closely resembles an unsolved local one from two years ago. Now Connor is in a sea of doodoo and it takes all his effort to just stay upright.
So there you have it…a pretty typical murder suspense thriller set in a world of small town academia to make things more interesting. All the genre standards are present…multiple perspectives, multiple timelines, twist ending, etc. This is Bell’s eight novel (let’s hope his tenure is secure), all in the same genre, so he’s basically a pro, this reads like it was done by a pro, all the boxes checked and so on. Good character development. Mostly. This’ll tie in with the earlier mostly. Because it seems the author got too clever with the final twist and abandoned basic plausibility in order to make it stick.
The final plot twist is such a crucial thing to the genre that one must take great care discussing it and I’ll try, but reader be warned and take caution proceeding…because the thoughts on the final twist are to follow in the next paragraph.
Ok, so I’ve had my suspicions about the killer for a while, but Bell cleverly deflected them until the end. The novel was flying along with great confidence but it didn’t quite stick the landing. The final twist is kind of like…really? that totally doesn’t jive with the character or at least the character as they were presented until now. Why would you go all confessional when you have so much to risk and there’s no evidence against you and all the witnesses are dead? Just so the author can hit the goal of twisting that plot and stunning his readers? Well, this reader didn’t buy it. It might work for others, though.
And we’re back, that was nice and generic, wasn’t it? Anyway, so that ending was the book’s main detractor for me to cherrytop minor detractor of the book’s size, (like most Americans) too unnecessarily fat as in not enough muscle beneath the bulk. Mostly heavy padding through exhaustive narrative hopping around. The book should have been way leaner. To Bell’s credit (pro, remember) it doesn’t read like a long book, it’s very dialogue driven and therefore reads quickly enough and easily. And it is fun, it is mostly fun. Enough to recommend it. With fairly interesting and realistic characters and perfectly oriented to the present day MeToo zeitgeist. Kudos to the author for being so woke and a strange knack for writing very believable young women among other things. So evil professors in small town academia preying on damsels in thesis mode…there you go. Overall entertaining read. Thanks Netgalley.

​    With a title like that and a plane on the cover you know something’s going to go terribly wrong. If they just had a plane and titled it Flying then you’d be in for a doozy of a surprise. So pop some corn and get ready for a high altitude adventure.
   It’s been a while since I’ve read just a purely adrenaline driven thriller for thriller’s sake, not a mystery, not a procedural, not a murder solving thing, just something silly and fun and boombastic. A Michael Bay movie, essentially, though with a more complicated, politically correct and woke morality. Is that a sign of times or just a reflection of the author’s gender? Who knows. Doesn’t matter.
    It was going to be an ordinary day for one ordinary all American family. Bill, the father, was off to do his job and be a pilot and Carrie, the mother, was to stay put and take care of their two kids. It was going to be an ordinary flight too for Bill, a straight through from west coast to the east. But then it all went to sh*t. All of it.
    Now Carrie and the kids are kidnapped and the only way Bill can save them is if he crashes the plane. And, as if that wasn’t enough, there’s also someone on the plane itself, an accomplice. So the pressure is on. Can Bill, the heroic, patriotic pilot save the day?
    What do you think? You know this movie before it’s inevitably made into one, don’t you. It has rousing (Independence day style) speeches and strategically lachrymose moments and principled diligent goodness in the face of evil. It has a freaking baseball game. This entirely production is so American, it just needs a flag, an apple pie and personal arsenal.     
   You know Bill won’t let you down because he’s the good guy and Carrie will hold her own too, because she’s the good woman behind the good guy and also a total motherbear. And you know the flight attendants will prove to be both heroic and awesome, because…well, mostly because the author was a flight attendant herself for 10 years prior to finding success as a popcorn moviebook writer. Seriously, Newman’s own story is way more inspirational than her book, a book she wrote on numerous flights and passed around for 41 rejections before getting a multibook deal with a major publisher. Now that’s kinda awesome.
   The book itself isn’t awesome as such, but it’s really committed to being the best summer high flying extravaganza it can be and that’s quite something. It practically pops its own popcorn at an altitude. You almost have to admire that sort of zeal. And much like all those silly huge productions, it is inherently entertaining. It might be the most amount of fun you can have on a place without Samuel L. Jackson shouting obscenities. It’s definitely all the thing the recent 7500 movie tried to be and failed

​ So our library system has this one listed at book 6 in the series, but seems like the great trenched one has had some adventures in between this book and book five. Maybe standalone adventures. This one reads like a standalone adventure. A high sea adventure no less, one that finds our leading boy man adrift and rescued by a ship out of time led by a strange woman on a quest for a legendary sea monster. Doesn’t that just sound awesome? And I didn’t even read the description going in, Mignola with his awesome talent and imagination has already made such a fan out of me, I’ll read whatever he does.
   This one, unlike all the last five, was cowritten and drawn by a different person, which might have been offputting had that person not been Gianni, from the first page on…it’s all pure wow. Gianni’s art is reminiscent of woodcarvings or litographs, made all the more striking by gorgeous colors. The man was a perfect choice to tell this story, it worked out exceptionally well. Brighter than classic Mignola, but still dark enough to suit the overall theme.
   Much like an exciting dream (or technically a creature feature nightmare), this one went by too fast. But oh what fun it was while it lasted. I’m so sad our library decided to not continue buying these books (though they seem to buy every manga there is), but maybe one day great red one…maybe one day we’ll meet again. And oh yeah, loved the book, obviously. Recommended.

​    Ah. Perfect. Quantum Dreams are made of this and who are we to disagree. This was an absolutely excellent collection of genre hopping short fiction. From science fiction to literary scares and more to just plain oddness…this relatively slender collection provides a terrific span of speculative fiction done in the finest literary style.
    Mostly I suppose it can all go under an umbrella of magic realism. And magic realism is tough to do, because it seems like an oxymoron of a genre, each of the components seemingly too contradictory for each other to amount to a cohesive total and yet, in a kismet style of attracting opposites, when it works it is magic indeed, a real, realistic kind. And the author seems to excel at level and balanced depiction of strikingly bizarre scenarios.
    Clark plays with familiar genre concepts, but be it zombies, vampires, ghosts, shapeshifters, clones or something completely other, each take is completely original, singular and fresh. It’s all so imaginative, so clever, so fun…you won’t want to put the book down and since it clocks in at just under 200 pages you won’t have to. Just dive right in. The water is…welcomingly strange or strangely welcoming. And sure there may be fins, but with this book you’ll never know who they might belong to.
    I loved this collection with a passion I normally reserve for fresh fruit and baked goods. Such an awesome, enormously enjoyable read. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.