Laughter of Dead Kings - Elizabeth Peters

**** - I'm not as big of a fan of the Vicky Bliss series as I am of Amelia Peabody, but that's not really saying much considering that Elizabeth Peters is an automatic autobuy either way. This was certainly a fun addition to the series, although I feel I should have brushed up on the last few books (at least Night Train to Memphis) before reading this one.
At any rate, in typical Vicky Bliss fashion, John is sexy (and occasionally infuriating), Schmidt is adorable, and Vicky figures it all out through part blunder, part wits, and part sheer determination. Great fun!

When a priceless ancient Egyptian artifact is stolen from under the noses of the authorities in the Valley of the Kings, it bears all the earmarks of a crime perpetrated by international art thief and conman 'Sir John Smythe' - the upper-crust accent, the sheer audacity. But John (who happens to be the long-term boyfriend of our heroine) swears up and down that he had nothing to do with the crime. So he and Vicky Bliss, clever and intrepid art historian, once again make their way to Egypt to discover the true criminal and to clear John's name and to help their friend Feisal.

So how did it go? It was a really quick, engrossing read. I often felt that the actual mystery took a bit of a backseat. It seemed like the villain had the upper hand throughout most of the story, and that resolution was more blundered into than reasoned out. I also felt like there was an awful lot of time spent eating or drinking... but that's almost inevitable when Schmidt enters the picture. And I do enjoy Vicky's focus on real needs (food, clothes, baths) rather than the typical I can run 24 hours on no food, no sleep, etc. and not even need a bathroom! that is seen in so many thriller/mysteries. So I'm not really complaining. It's not as strong as others in the series, but it was still a whole lot of fun.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me confess right now that I'm (not-so-secretly) in love with John Smythe. He's a dashing art thief, and in those prior books the one thing that still stands out is his charm.Vicky and John's relationship has its rocky bits, but it certainly feels real and affectionate to me. I also adore Vicky's boss Schmidt as a character. Everytime he's mentioned he reminds me of a more bungling Hercule Poirot or possibly Indy's friend Remy from the Young Indiana Jones TV show...just not Belgian. I don't know, maybe it's the magnifying glass he loves to take with him everywhere. And in this book, Anton Z. Schmidt finally comes into his own in the coolest possible way. Yay!

I suppose it's a bit obvious that I've grown to love the characters in the Vicky Bliss novels, and I'm happy to see everything work out so well. This may not be my favorite or the best worked out of the Vicky Bliss novels, but it certainly didn't disappoint me. Elizabeth Peters once again delivers an intriguing mystery, addresses certain issues facing museums in an interesting way, and lets the reader spend time with her wonderfully zany characters (including a bit of a bow to the Amelia Peabody series).

Definitely a good read, I'd recommend it - just not as a place to start the series. That would be Borrower of the Night.

Interested in other opinions?
Romance Rookie
The Good, the Bad, the Unread

Tuesday Thingers - LT Authors

Today's topic: LibraryThing authors. Who are your LibraryThing authors? What books of theirs do you have? Do you ever comment on an author's LT page? Have you received any comments from an author on your LT account?

My first shot at Tuesday Thinging, but I need to get back into the swing of having internet and actually posting, so here it goes:

Joanna Bourne - The Spymaster's Lady (absolutely amazing) and My Lord and Spymaster (reviewed here)

Sarah Beth Durst - Into the Wild

Naomi Novik - His Majesty's Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory (great series akin to Horatio Hornblower on dragons; seriously I love these)

Dian Curtis Regan - Princess Nevermore

Michelle Rowen - Angel with Attitude

Shanna Swendson - Enchanted Inc, Once Upon Stilettos, Damsel Under Stress, Don't Hex with Texas (aren't the titles awesome?)

I clearly need to do a LT author feature review. Any in particular you guys would be interested in? Perhaps that would even bring my comments up some... none so far, but I live in hope :-).

The Eight - Katherine Neville

***1/2 - a fun (bit mystical) thriller based around a legendary chess service surrounding Charlemagne and an all too real Game in which people take on the roles of chess pieces. Certainly intriguing and with plenty of action, but I have to admit to being completely confused as to the point of or object of The Game...

The Eight is one of my favorite types of thrillers - the parallel plotline:

Fearing for its safety during the French Revolution, the abbess of Montagne removes the legendary Montglane Service, brought to Charlemagne by eight mysterious Moors, from its hiding place of almost a millennium. She charges young nuns Mireille and Valentine with safeguarding one of the precious pieces from those who would seek to use the service's power.

1972, Catherine Velis is being exiled to Algiers after a disagreement over ethics in her accounting firm. But before she leaves, she becomes embroiled in murders, cryptic clues involving Russian chess Grandmaster Alexander Solarin, and the search for the pieces of the Montglane Service. Once Cat begins to realize what is at stake and who represents what pieces, the race is on to decipher clues and reunite the pieces of the actual service before the other team can.

This was a good fast airplane read. The chess parts (a game, I confess, I haven't got the patience of the inclination for) don't bog down; there are car chases, exotic locations, and bad guys to outwit. Since Cat is a newcomer to cryptic puzzles, the reader gets to work alongside her to decipher the clues and learn snippets of all kinds of history, linguistics, etc. I enjoyed those parts, though I have to question some of her details (ex. I don't believe Karlsbad was named for Qar, but more likely some German king by the ever-popular name of Karl...) and some of the continuity (if her feet are covered in blood blisters, shouldn't she have more trouble scaling that cliff?).

The historical bits seemed a bit of a stretch at times. It seemed that every person encountered was ridiculously famous (Napoleon, Marat, Talleyrand, Robespierre, Catherine the Great, Bach, Voltaire). Is it too much to ask that the characters occasionally meet someone not to be found in history books? Other than that (a minor point really), though, my only squabble with the historical story is that it didn't really seem to wrap up very well.

I found the insertions of The Composer's Tale, etc. to be a bit irritating. It seemed like it should be an homage to the Canterbury Tales and Chaucer, but it wasn't quite pulled off. Instead of being ways of introducing exposition and alternate viewpoints, it seemed like it was simply a device to avoid having to recount the entire story in dialogue. Which, of course, it was, but it shouldn't be so obvious. There also just didn't seem to be enough differentiation in voice between the main narrators and the stories told to them by other characters for me to remember who was talking.

Generally these are fairly minor nitpicks. The story is interesting and full of adventure. I love the parts set in the Casbah, in the canyons in the Sahara, and in the Atlas mountains. Neville really has a way with describing breathtaking desertscapes and the teem of the city so that it feels immediate, beautiful and real. These are the parts of the novel that really shine (though I love the puzzly bits, too).

Overall, though, what kept this from being an outstanding read for me was that I just didn't understand the motivation behind The Game. I get that they're looking for the secret formula hidden in the Service. What I don't get is why they assume the identities of chess pieces, what those roles signify, how 'moves' are made. What the object of The Game actually is. Kill the King? Become the Queen? Keep the pieces? Maybe it would be more clear to me if I understood chess better, but this aspect of the book very much puzzled me. And without some sort of resolution or understanding, I found the novel's premise unsatisfying.

An engaging read, but puzzling (pun fully intended).

Interested in the sequel? You can find my review The Fire here.

Interested in other opinions?

Obsessed with Books

The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber

**1/2 - severely underwhelming. There's only one sympathetic main character in the lot (Crosetti), and he loses points for acting amazingly stupid over a girl. The whole Shakespeare manuscript thing is used as a huge hook, but nothing really comes of it. Any old Maltese Falcon would have done. I liked the musing on film, but the random eugenics/Nazi/Jewish mafia plotline felt like serious overkill. Ultimately forgettable leaving nothing but a bad taste from unlikeable characters.

The story starts out with IP lawyer Jake Mishkin waiting to be killed. A strong beginning. Except that Jake then proceeds to tell the reader about himself. Things go downhill from there. You see, Mishkin has serious issues. He cheats on his wife, ignores his children, can't stand his (obviously to everyone except apparently his parents) autistic son, brags about his size, strength and salary, and apparently needs a screwed-up family history (Jewish mafia father married to an SS-officer's daughter) to make him interesting. All of this background really doesn't get the reader where he wants to be - namely finding out the plot, why does someone want to kill Mishkin?

After a fire, Carolyn Rolly (hobby book restorer) and wanna-be director/screenwriter Al Crosetti discover letters from one Richard Bracegirdle, a man sent to spy on suspected papist William Shakespeare. Along with the letters Crosetti finds a stack of encrypted pages which may lead to a handwritten manuscript of a lost Shakespeare play. Scene set?

What follows is a mess of unraveling clues, gangsters bent on violence, femme fatale-types, and the high points - more of Bracegirdle's letters. Much too much time is spent on Jake's issues, on Carolyn's issues (and it's certainly hard to work up a lot of sympathy for someone who leaves her kids in the hands of an abuser), Crosetti's issues, and tearing across the map and not a whole lot is left over for actually solving the puzzles. But it certainly is fast-paced. That is until the end. The great show-down we've been waiting for since the beginning: people coming to kill Mishkin. But the whole thing is too implausible for words, and not in the fun campy action-movie sort of way. Not in a heart-pounding way. Just in a wow-I'd-better-wrap-this-up sort of way.

I think I could have really enjoyed this book had it been told with more of a focus on Crosetti. I liked him. I loved his mother and her Polish ex-spy maybe-love interest. But I had no interest at all in Jake, his sex issues, his mommy issues, his violence issues, etc. I didn't care about his 'journey' and I didn't buy his resolution. So The Book of Air and Shadows, while intriguing as a thriller about books really didn't work for me.

Something in a similar vein (literary-ish thriller) that did suit me: Leslie Silbert's The Intelligencer.

Mighty Penis Syndrome

I am irritated. My recent reading of romance novels has uncovered an unfortunate ailment - I refer to it as The Mighty Penis Syndrome: in which formerly intelligent and feisty young women are reduced to whimpering gelatinous invertebrates solely due to the sexual prowess of the hero's mighty penis.

And not in the good way.

Most recently this was seen in Nicole Jordan's To Pleasure a Lady.
This sort of thing drives me up the wall in movies, in books, in general. Why can't perfectly capable heroines remain capable when there's a testosterone-oozing male waving his manly bits around?

Whispers in the Sand - Barbara Erskine

*** - It had everything that I love in a story - romance, artists, Egypt, magic, parallel connected stories - it just never pulled it all together to deliver. The ending was ridiculously frustrating as it didn't resolve anything after over 500 pages. That's just not cool. That said the Victorian sections of the story are very nicely done - charming and evocative.

To recover from her recent divorce, Anna Fox decides to embark on a great adventure - a boat tour of Egypt from Luxor to Aswan tracing the footsteps of her Victorian ancestor Louisa, a renowned watercolorist. Anna takes with her two of Louisa's possessions - her diary filled with sketches, and an ancient Egyptian scent bottle. And these objects start Anna on an adventure she hadn't reckoned with.

The valuable diary unleashes a bitter rivalry between two of the men on the tour who vie for Anna's affections, and a glimpse at the precious pages. But the diary is important to Anna because of the touching love story unfolding within its pages, but also for the description of the uncanny events surrounding the scent bottle - events that seem to have echoes on Anna's present-day cruise. And soon Anna must also contend with the spectres of two long-dead rival priests who seem to grow in strength and malevolence as they leech off the strength of Anna and her fellow tour passengers.

I'm completely mad for Egypt, and I have been since I was very small. I enjoy ghost stories with unfinished business and magical rites. I'm also utterly fascinated by Victorian era travel in Egypt (hence my love of Elizabeth Peters' intrepid adventurer Amelia Peabody), so this book had all of the right elements to be a raging success with me. But somehow it never really hooked me.

Actually, no, that's not true. I was well and truly hooked on Louisa's story. I loved the descriptions of the beauty of Egypt as she painted it, and I adored the tender love story unfolding despite all the social barriers standing between her and the object of her affections. But the present-day story just didn't work for me. While the spirits hung around growing ever more menacing, Anna just didn't seem to be doing anything to get rid of them. She would be told things she should try, but upon the spectre's next appearance, she would scream and go faint; everyone would cluck and exclaim about the heat, and then everybody would drink some more and forget all about it. It was just rather frustrating. The entire modern section of the story was an exercise in frustration, most particularly the ending.

After I hung in there for the 573 pages, I was expecting some actual resolution. I hoped in vain. I think with the right ending, this could have been very good. Even with a somewhat sappy ending, this would have been a fun read. But this ending just left me feeling unsatisfied. But it did reinforce my desire to go take a cruise up the Nile, so that's something to be said for it...

Pandora's Daughter - Iris Johansen

*** - There wasn't anything obviously bad about this book. It just wasn't much good for me. I felt no investment towards the characters; no stake in their fate. I wasn't interested in their 'gifts' or involved in their personal lives. I didn't like them for the most part - the character I liked best was in a coma for most of the book. The premise sounds interesting, but it just wasn't given any life at all. A tepid thriller at best.

12 years ago, Megan Blair lost everything she held dear - her mother, the life they had built, and she almost lost her mind to the sinister whispers of pain and agony that tore through her. Now Megan has built up a successful career as a physician, and she hasn't heard the voices in a long time. But her peace is about to be shattered. Neal Grady pushes his way into her life with unbelievable claims about her mother's death and her own dormant psychic powers. Powers he intends to use to discover the whereabouts of a secret ledger - a ledger that the madman who killed her mother would do anything for. And that madman wants to kill Megan.

I like psychics. I love reading things about latent psychic powers, especially when they're involved in high-action thrillers. But although Johansen tries everything to raise the stakes (rape, child slavery and molestation, torture) the threat from the villain never seems immediate, and he really just seems like a caricature of evil rather than anything actually terrifying. The buttons are pushed, the plotline is there - it's just not particularly believable. The close calls with said madman's henchmen never actually seem to that close. And Megan never really seems that scared. So the stake simply wasn't high enough for me as a reader to get engrossed, engaged and fearful. So that was a bust.

The romantic angle didn't really work at all, either. The main characters supposed intimacy that came from a) the fact that he lusted after her when she was 15 despite their decade age-difference (EWWW) and b) the fact that he had lived in her head for years in order to help tamp down the voices just never seemed that intimate. Grady seemed to be acting like a selfish jerk most of the time (claiming that he allowed her to have a life, the fact that he was a controller in general, him having no problem risking her capture, rape and mutilation for a bunch of paper), and as a whole I neither felt the tension nor the 'romance'. A big whopping 'so what' to their relationship.

So really, the book failed to engage on all levels. Motivations were obscure or unbelievable. Tension was low or non-existent, and the whole psychic angle was one of the most unconvincing portrayals that I've ever encountered. Possibly because the whole thing was never explained or even experienced in any detail in the narrative. This had none of the visceral connection necessary to make a thriller thrill. Definitely not an author I'll be seeking out in the future.

Book Giveaway Contest!

And now for something not quite COMPLETELY different.
It's good news for us bibliophiles out in the blogosphere. Especially for those of us that like action-packed spy adventures - and, honestly, who doesn't?

Lenore over at presentinglenore.blogspot.com has been generous enough to offer a chance to win the entire Specialists series by Shannon Greenland. You can find the contest and a great interview with the author HERE.

And regardless of whether any of us win (though keep your fingers crossed), you can be sure I'll be adding this to my TBR pile!