What I've Been Reading

May 29, 2010

Here's a list of the last 10 books I've read--with comments.

Extremes by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Sci-Fi. One of the most glamorous extreme sports is the Moon Marathon. But when someone dies during the race in very mysterious circumstances, both the Lunar Police and a former cop turned Reclamation Expert must work together before a plague can wipe out the Lunar colony.

The First Rule by Robert Crais

A Joe Pike novel and quite good. I prefer his Elvis Cole novels, but this is good.

Freudian Slip by Erica Orloff

A very light kinda-romance novel. I think that's how it was marketed anyway. When a top-rated shock jock is shot and winds up in a coma, he finds himself in a kind of purgatory where he needs to improve a woman's life in order to either move on or go back. Very sweet and nicely done.

Deception by Jonathan Kellerman

An Alex Delaware novel and a good one. Some of his recent ones, though good, have seemed a bit by-the-numbers. This one has Alex and Milo investigating the suicide of a teacher that worked at a really ritzy private school. One of the complications is that the LAPD's Chief's son is a senior at the school; the Chief puts pressure on Milo to handle the investigation delicately and not to upset anyone or get the attention of the press.

Bag of Bones by Stephen King

Yeah, every few years, I read this book of a bestselling author whose wife dies and he gets tangled up in a child custody case with a psycho billionaire.

Deep Shadow by Randy Wayne White

I've decided you can never know what to expect when you pick up a book by RWW. They all deal with Doc Ford, but sometimes the books seem like espionage, sometimes like adventure, sometimes like mystery. This one is an interesting thriller involving underwater cave diving, a couple psycho ex-cons, a plane carrying Batista's gold and, uh, a really big reptile.

Pocket-47 by Jude Hardin.

I read Jude's first novel in manuscript form and enjoyed it. (I'll enjoy it even more once it's published and I can read it in book form). A PI novel and I think folks will like it a lot.

The English Assassin by Daniel Silva

An espionage novel featuring Israeli assassin Gabriel Allon. This time he gets tangled up in looted Nazi artwork and a high-level English assassin who is hired to kill various people associated with the case Gabriel is looking into. He's a great writer, although he's not the type I read back-to-back. Terrific, though.

The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan

Sadie and Carter Kane discover they are ascendants from the pharoahs. When their father blows up the British museum, he inadvertently unleashes the Egyptian god of chaos and death, Set, who intends to wipe out the planet. Sadie and Carter must join modern day Egyptian magicians (sort of) to stop this from happening. I liked this a lot. I wanted to like it better, but I tended to compare it to Riordan's Percy Jackson books, which I liked a little better. But great fun.

Storm Prey by John Sandford

A Lucas Davenport novel and another excellent entry in this series that has no duds. Three rednecks, hooked up with a cocaine-addicted doctor, decide to knock off a Minneapolis hospital pharmacy, stealing a few million dollars worth of drugs. During the incident, one of the pharmacists is accidentally killed. Davenport's wife, a surgeon at the hospital (Weather Karkinnen) may be a witness. The crooks, who pretty much define "not a rocket scientist" start to panic and kill off anyone who might know who they are, including Weather. Weather, meantime, is involved with a team of physicians who are working to separate conjoined twins. Both story lines are very compelling and I thought it was a really excellent portrait of how a certain type of bad guy operates--instead of just hunkering down and keeping their mouths shut, they start trying to clean things up, making things much, much worse until everything spins out of control.