The Perilous Sea by Sherry Thomas

The second volume in the Elemental series – the boys at Eton take a holiday at one boy’s uncle’s estate on the Scottish coast.  One boy, Wintervale, was not able to attend as his mother was not well.  But suddenly, Fairfax and Titus see the boy in a skiff trying desperately to escape from an Atlantis frigate.  When all seems lost, the boy, looks back at the frigate and it is caught in a maelstrom, sucked under by the whirlpool.  He seems completely out of it when he reaches shore and when the prince administers a remedy, he goes into a seizure.  From then on, he has a terrible time walking and has to be helped everywhere.  But worse, Titus now thinks his vision of Iolanthe being the one who will help him succeed in his quest to overthrow Atlantis was wrong and it’s Wintervale instead.

The book is written in two timelines.  In the other timeline, Iolanthe and Titus are in the Sahara desert and don’t remember anything.  However, they’re attacked by agents of Atlantis and fight their way across the desert until allies rescue them.  The book does tie both together at the end.  Which apparently the real showdown that will be explained in book three.

The Burning Sky by Sherry Thomas - (5/23)

The same author as A Study in Scarlet Women.  This is a fantasy set in an Earth where Atlantis and The Domain are populated by mages of differing abilities.  Our main characters are Iolanthe Seabourne, a young woman who suddenly is able to call down lightning, a great feat for an elemental mage,  and Prince Titus, Master of The Domain.  Opposed to the pair is Atlantis, ruled by the Bane.  In order to hide Iolanthe, Titus disguises her as a boy and she spends the next year at Eton with a magical spell that makes everyone think ‘he’ is Fairfax, a great cricket player.  Titus also lays a spell to keep any image of Fairfax from being recognized.  Through training in the Crucible, a magic book with tests, Titus trains Fairfax to get better with the one element she has no control over; air.  And he falls in love with her, but struggles to keep his eye on the goal; the overthrow of Atlantis.

Egg and Spoon by Gregory Maguire

A masterpiece that creeps up on you.  Two young girls in Russia – one, a peasant, Elena, whose father died trying to save a bunch of girls from a flood, her mother is dying, her brothers have been ripped from their home and there’s no food, no medicine and almost no one left in her village.  The other, Ekaterina, comes in a train that stops for a bridge to be repaired.  This one is a near-princess, part of the nobility, who has a rich Aunt, a governess, and a butler trying to rein her in, though she is bored.  The two girls become somewhat friends.  Ekaterina shows Elena a gift, a Fabergé egg, they’re taking to the Tsar, who wants to show-off his godson, Anton.  The egg has three mythical scenes: Baba Yaga’s chicken house, the ice dragon, and the firebird.  But the train lurches into motion and Ekaterina falls out of the train with the egg, while Elena falls into the train.

While Elena girl finds herself forced to hide, she ends-up having to impersonate Ekaterina in order to try to keep the butler and the governess from getting in trouble.  Meanwhile, Ekaterina is cornered by a snow tiger and herded to a bridge.  On the other side, she finds Baba Yaga’s house, but instead of eating the offered, poisonous, soup, she gives the egg to Baba Yaga.  Meanwhile, Elena, at a stop of the train, tries to escape.  She sights the Firebird and reaches to take a tail feather so she could get a magical wish granted.  But a hen, chased by a fox enters from the other side just as the Firebird becomes aware of the peasant girl and turns on her.  The hen crashes into the Firebird, grabs a feather and the fox runs off.  An explosion occurs and there is an egg left behind.  Elena grabs the egg as a possible replacement of the Tsar’s gift.

The story is narrated by a monk, who had the favor of the Tsar, then lost it by helping the girls.  All three of the children go off on an adventure with Baba Yaga, meet the ice dragon, who is causing floods and an almost non-existent winter to happen.  His teeth are used to make a fence, they turn into an army, matryoshka dolls, extra large in size come along and marry the soldiers, everyone goes home happy.

Years later, under communism, the children have grown and take care of others in a kitchen.  The monk wanders the country, still observing and bringing the end of the story to a brilliant conclusion.

Hades by Candice Fox

Fox’s first novel is dark and probing.  Hades is a man who fixes things for criminals.  But when he’s brought a car with two battered and wounded children inside, he cannot dispose of them.  Instead he takes them in and raises them.  But Eden and Ethan can’t forget what happened to them and who the men were who killed their parents.  When they grow-up, they’re brilliant, they become cops, then detectives in the police department, and they’re sociopaths when it comes to their enemies.  And they’ve been using their resources to hunt down and kill the men who killed their parents.  There’s only one left.  Enter our narrator, the new partner to Eden.  The last one died in action.  Our narrator has his own problems, with alcohol and with women.  He becomes suspicious of the brother and sister detectives, but he’s busy dealing with a surviving victim of a serial killer.  The ending is both inevitable and a surprise.

Get Real - Donald Westlake

A Dortmunder novel – John and his occasional cohorts are asked to talk to a reality show producer about filming them while they do a real job.  No one in the gang wants to go to jail, but the producer offers them a cash bonus and per diem.  It sounds sketchy, but they agree to rehearsals while looking in the building for something worth stealing.  It has Westlake’s usual flare for comedic scenes of misunderstandings and an ending that make the book worth reading.

A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas

An interesting variation on the Sherlock Holmes stories.  Charlotte Holmes has an extraordinary mind.  She has no interest in becoming married to a man.  So after her father reneges on his promise to pay for the education that she might become independent, she intentionally loses her maidenhead to a married man.  That way he cannot be forced to marry her and her worth as a prospective bride is dashed in the eyes of any other man.  Then she ‘runs away from home’ determined to establish herself.  Unfortunately things do not go as planned.  A childhood friend, who is now a Lord, tries to watch out for her, but that only brings anger.  She ‘happens’ upon an ex-actress who is a widow, whose name turns out to be Mrs. Watson.  It is she who concocts the scheme of fronting a ‘sick’ Sherlock Holmes, whose sister, Charlotte, takes messages to him.  This book highlights three murders which happen to be inter-related.  In the end, a mysterious man seems to be behind it all.  His name is Moriarity.

Well written

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness & Siobhan Dowd

Frequently a book is simply better than the movie.  In this case it’s better written and so much darker. 

Conor lives alone with his mother, who is dying from cancer.  She’s been getting treatments, but they’re failing to make her better.  His father lives in America with his ‘other family’.  Conor has been havinv nightmares every night.  In the churchyard across the field from their home is a yew tree.  One night, it comes to life and walks to Conor’s bedroom.  In the movie, it feels like an adventure.  In the book, it’s another nightmare.  Especially the fourth story, the one from Conor, the truth.

I could not read this without hearing Liam Neeson’s voice as the monster.

A note on authorship.  Mr. Ness has written a masterful work based on the idea of another writer, Siobhan Dowd, who died before she could write the book.  He could have taken all the credit, but he has made a point of citing her as co-author.

Tell No One by Harlan Coben

A Doctor and his wife, who has been his love since they were five years old, are on a trip to the family’s private lake when they are attacked.  He was swimming and could not get to his wife fast enough, and when he did reach the dock, he was knocked back into the water.  They found the body a few days later.  She had been stabbed repeatedly and branded with a ‘K’ just as several other victims of a serial killer.

Now, nine years later, he gets a mysterious email that has a feed from a security camera and his wife looks at him for 30 seconds.

He starts asking questions, digging up the old case and trying to find out what is going on.  This brings the attention of the FBI, who think he was the real killer.  More and more damning evidence turns up and he has to run to keep ahead of the authorities while he searches for the truth.

The Midnight Line by Lee Child

Reacher steps off a bus to stretch his legs.  There’s not much to see.  The only thing open in a pawn shop.  He finds a ring there, a West Point graduation ring, size small, like a woman’s ring.  It has an inscription.  He knows what hell a woman had to have gone through to earn that ring, so he decides to buy it and track her down to return it.  He gets the name of the person who sold to the pawn shop and where they’re from.  He goes there.

Reacher finds a network hidden in the back of a self-serve laundry that nobody uses.  As he tracks the origin he finds a Major, like his own rank, who did five tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.  She was injured by an IED and like many soldiers returning from war, the meds ran out, so she’s gone back to her childhood home in the mountains of Wyoming and is surviving there.

Her twin sister has also been looking for her, so when Reacher helps track her down, there is a lot to discuss and do, Reacher’s way.

Down the River unto the Sea by Walter Mosley

A new character; Joe King Oliver, private eye and former cop.  He was setup with a woman who then filed a complaint complete with video.  It’s 13 years later and he hasn’t forgotten that they showed the tape to his wife while they had him in an interrogation room, nor the fact that she wouldn’t post bail and left him to the tender mercies of prejudiced cops and felons he had put away.  She immediately divorced him.

Now he has a client on death row.  He was framed by the same cops.  An assistant attorney brought the case to him.  His daughter insisted that he take the case.  But he needs help.  And he finds it in the form of a man he’d caught escaping but had no evidence.  When called upon to testify in court, he refused to lie to convict the man.  Now that man, a killer with extended resources is helping Joe break a man out of prison on death row.

Mosley writes in first person, getting in the head of his protagonist so the reader becomes vested in his success.

Saga Volume 1 by Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staples

A sci-fi/fantasy about the people who inhabit a world and have wings, and their mortal enemies who inhabit their moon and have horns.  They’ve been at war for as long as anyone can remember, pitting science and magic in their fighting.  But having tired of the destruction of their own homes, it has become a proxy war waged throughout the universe.  One of the horned people is captured and held prisoner.  He lends a book to his female, winged guard and is broken out of jail as a result.  They escape and go on the lamb and have a child.  This is something both sides have always told their people is impossible.  As a result, professional assassins are hired to find them and kill them, except to bring the child back discreetly.  There’s a one-eyed novelist who writes the inciting book, there are mere-people who are reporters, trying to get the story published, there are bat-winged people trying to prevent this, a humanoid assassin who is in love with a spider woman assassin and who’s sister is also an assassin, a cat who can tell if someone is lying, a dog who sneezes sleeping darts, people who are part robot, a robot child, and the narrator, the offspring child that everyone wants to find.  Not safe for work – there are a lot of pornographic images in the artwork. (54 issues in this volume)

Redemption by David Baldacci

Amos Decker is visiting the graves of his wife and daughter when a man he helped put in jail for life without parole comes up to him and asks Amos to clear his name.  He has terminal cancer and only days to live.  He’s been let out of prison because the system does not want to pay for his health expenses.  That evening someone kills the man.  Decker decides to look into it against direct orders from the FBI.  The only people to talk to are the wife of one of the original murder victims and the man’s daughter.  But as Decker picks at the lives of these people from thirteen years ago,it seems like everyone Decker talks to ends up murdered.  And the real secrets behind it all is almost unbelievable.

Bootleggers Daughter by Margaret Maron

Deborah Knott is appalled by the utter disregard for mercy as she watches her least favorite judge declare the toughest possible sentence on a black man.  She decides to run for a judgeship herself.  A young woman whose mother was murdered when she was just an infant wants to pay Deborah to find out why her mother was killed.  Between her campaign and asking around about the incident that had happened 18 years ago, other people begin to die.  In the end, Deborah figures out who and saves the girl again.  But she loses the election.  However her least favorite judge is felled by a stroke, and her father calls in some favors to get her appointed to take his place.

Cockroaches by Jo Nesbo (3/10)

Harry Hole is brought out of his drunken stupor to go close a case in Bangkok where the Norwegian Ambassador was found murdered in a disreputable hotel.  He doesn’t really want to go, but he had some celebrity from his last case and that’s who they want to handle this one.  He’s supposed to just clean-up and call the case unsolvable.  But of course, that’s not how Harry operates.  He needs to find out who really killed the Ambassador, and other parties that seem to drop like flies.  In the end, at great personal risk and cost, he nails the bad guy and wakes-up later in a hospital, recovering.  But now that the case is closed, he has to try to seek oblivion again – only this time in an opium den.

The Killing Fog by Jeff Wheeler

A fantasy in an Asian-like land where magic is real and when it is used, it draws the killing fog.  A practitioner of marshal arts sees her own parents murdered and her grandfather killed.  She escapes by hiding and grows up in a neighboring dojo.  When her group is hired to find a legendary city beneath the ice, she accidentally awakens a spirit who is the former emperor and he wants to rule once more.  Only he can use magic and is not hurt by the fog, though his enemies are not immune.  Our girl is the one to fulfill a prophecy, but the only way she can defeat him is to sacrifice herself beyond to wall where no one returns.

Liar, Liar by James Patterson & Candice Fox

In this episode, our heroine, Detective Harriet Blue is wanted as a rogue cop, going after a serial killer who has murdered indiscriminately, then killed her brother after setting him up to take the fall for several deaths he did not cause, and trying to kill her temporary partner.  He’s after doing the same thing to her and using a psychologist as his gopher to blame or cause her own death.  It’s intense with no let-up throughout the whole book.  It goes from dark to bleak and never comes back.

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

Written in verse, this tour-de-force follows a boy whose brother was just shot and killed.  As he takes the elevator down from his apartment, after having retrieved his brother’s gun, he is met at each floor by ghosts of others in his family who have also died by gunshot; his uncle, a girl he knew at a playground, his father, even the young man who killed his father, and his brother.  They all ask him why he thinks he needs a gun.  And it ends with that question still open.

This book won honors from Newbery, Correta Scott King, Prinz, and won the Walter Dean Myers Award and The Edgar for Best Young Adult Fiction.

End Game by David Baldacci (2/12)

In the fifth novel in the Will Robie series, Blue Man, Robie and Reel’s handler is missing.  He went on his annual vacation to Colorado and has not reported back.  The two government assassins are sent to find him.  Grand, Colorado is a tiny town with open carry (everyone), and little to nothing to do outside of hiring out as guides for wanna-be hunters and fishermen.\

The heroes find out that Blue Man grew-up in the town and lost his parents in an accident.  The woman he should have married is growing medicinal marijuana.  The girl he doesn’t know is his daughter is part of something much worse.

The Guilty by David Baldacci

The fourth novel in the Will Robie series – Robie is sent to assassinate a potential leader who wants war with America.  But when he pulls the trigger, he finds a little girl had run into the room right behind the target and his bullet has killed both.  On his next mission he hesitates because he sees a little boy jump into the target’s arms.  Only it didn’t happen and Robie did not pull the trigger.

He’s sent to Cantrell, Mississippi where he grew-up because his estranged father has been accused of murder.  When he arrives, he finds out that his father remarried and has a very young, autistic son.  Robie has a half-brother.  He soon finds that there are very questionable things going on in the town and his partner, Jessica Reel has to intervene and come to his rescue.

Merci Suarez Changes Gears by Meg Medina

Merci’s family live in Miami.  They have three houses next to each other.  She goes to an exclusive school in trade for her family’s labor in painting and sewing.  Her older brother is considered the smartest kid in school and spends all his time in science labs.  She has younger twin brothers whom she loves, but hates to have to babysit.  She likes to play soccer and often plays on her father’s team.  Merci’s grandfather, Lolo, is changing due to Alzheimer’s.  At school, she tries to fit-in with a group of girls who tend to look down on her.

The book centers around Merce’s feelings and her not wanting change to happen and dealing with being a twelve-year-old.