Review: The Kill Shot by Nichole Christoff + Giveaway

Posted on April 3, 2015April 3, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews> Giveaways

Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: ebook
Genre: thriller
Series: Jamie Sinclair #2
Length: 282 pages
Publisher: Random House Alibi
Date Released: March 17, 2015
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo

Jamie Sinclair’s father has never asked her for a favor in her life. The former two-star general turned senator is more in the habit of giving his only child orders. So when he requests Jamie’s expertise as a security specialist, she can’t refuse—even though it means slamming the brakes on her burgeoning relationship with military police officer Adam Barrett. Just like that, Jamie hops aboard a flight to London with a U.S. State Department courier carrying a diplomatic pouch in an iron grip.

Jamie doesn’t have to wait long to put her unique skills to good use. When she and the courier are jumped by goons outside the Heathrow terminal, Jamie fights them off—but the incident puts her on high alert. Someone’s willing to kill for the contents of the bag. Then a would-be assassin opens fire in crowded Covent Garden, and Jamie is stunned to spot a familiar face: Adam Barrett, who saves her life with a single shot and calmly slips away. Jamie’s head—and her heart—tell her that something is very wrong. But she’s come way too far to turn back now.

My Review:

I read this one a few days ago, but had to wait a bit to write my review. I needed to get over my mad, because there were things that happened in this book that absolutely infuriated me. It says something that I got so involved with the character of Jamie Sinclair in the first book (The Kill List, reviewed here) that I wanted to grab her and shake her over some of her behavior in this book.

The Kill Shot is certainly another wild ride for Jamie, and if you like thrillers with female protagonists the series is looking good.

But some of Jamie’s behavior in this book will make her friends want to sit her down for a good “talking to”.

The story is pretty straightforward. Jamie’s father, the retired general and current senator, asks for Jamie’s help. Because her dad never asks for help, Jamie is immediately onboard with the project.

Dear Old Dad needs Jamie, in her role as expert security consultant and protective detail, to travel to London with a diplomatic courier and help the courier bring a famous physicist and their companion back to the U.S. using the U.S. passports that the courier has in a locked diplomatic pouch.

Not only does this sound straightforward, but the courier is a friendly enough young woman that Jamie is more than willing to guard her. Nothing in this case is presented as remotely dangerous. And not a damn thing about it is even close to what it seems.

There is a metric butt-load of danger, and every single person in the case is hiding an equivalent load of secrets.

Oh, and Jamie’s best friend and almost boyfriend from college is the British Foreign Office operative assigned to this case. He got himself into this mess in order to make one last play for Jamie. Or so he says.

This operation is a complete clusterfuck, to put it lightly. Danger follows at every turn, and Jamie leaves a trail of bad guy dead bodies behind her. Some of those dead bodies are dead because Adam Barrett, the MP that Jamie got interested in while investigating in The Kill List, has followed her to London and is shooting some of the people who are after her. Dad may have said he needed her, but that doesn’t mean he trusts her to get the job done. But then, Dear Old Dad knows a whole lot more about the job than he would ever tell Jamie.

Of course, now some of the people after Jamie are after Adam. Even joining forces isn’t enough to stop the carnage.

Can they figure out who is behind it all before Jamie and everyone she is protecting gets killed? And even if they do, can Jamie ever figure out who she can trust when everyone (including and especially Dear Old Dad) is playing her?

Escape Rating B-: Let me say this first; in The Kill List it seemed like every man Jamie met fell in love with her. Having one of her old besties start a hot and heavy pursuit did not help ameliorate this particular problem. That in this case the guy was at least half trying to distract Jamie from his downright skullduggery is only a slightly mitigating factor.

For Jamie to be believable, the men in her stories need to stop the romantic attempts. Except Barrett. (My 2 cents)

But speaking of believability, Jamie has a serious problem with her relationship with her father. It’s not just that when he says “jump”” she jumps first and asks “how high?” on the way up, it’s that she knows he doesn’t trust her, doesn’t believe her and will use any ends to justify any means. It’s that in this particular case she doesn’t demand any of the information that she needs to do her job. If he were any other client, she would have made certain to get all the particulars of her duties before taking the job, because knowing what and where the danger might be is what keeps her alive as a security consultant.

She also forgives him much too easily for leaving her out in the cold when the job turns ugly. His plausible deniability nearly gets her killed and nearly scuttles the mission she was sent on. If she was this sloppy all the time, she’d have been killed long ago.

Jamie needs some serious therapy to learn to deal with at least her reactions to her father if not with her father directly. He’s going to get her killed if he keeps this up, and she’s going to let him.

The major reason that this mission “goes South” repeatedly and often is that there is a traitor in their midst. Jamie is presented with clues multiple times that this is true and even the identity of the traitor, but she is too busy dealing with multiple firefights or their aftermath and many multiple instances of people lying to her and playing with her that she doesn’t figure out the real problem until nearly too late.

If this were a case she had acquired on her own, she would have done some due diligence which is totally lacking in this one.

Jamie’s actions in this case drove me crazy.

On that other hand, the amount of danger and the sheer number of deadly situations that arise during this mission will keep the reader flipping pages fast until the very end. And the twist at the end is a dilly.

TOURWIDE GIVEAWAY

This tour includes a Rafflecopter giveaway for a $25 eGift card to the eBook Retailer of the winner’s choice + an eBook copy of THE KILL SHOT.
a Rafflecopter giveaway

This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews.

***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

Review: Behind Closed Doors by Elizabeth Haynes

Posted on March 30, 2015April 3, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> blog tours> book reviews

Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genre: thriller
Series: DCI Louisa Smith #2
Length: 496 pages
Publisher: Harper
Date Released: March 31, 2015
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository

An old case makes Detective Inspector Louisa Smith some new enemies in this spellbinding second installment of New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Haynes’s Briarstone crime series that combines literary suspense and page-turning thrills.

Ten years ago, 15-year-old Scarlett Rainsford vanished while on a family holiday in Greece. Was she abducted, or did she run away from her severely dysfunctional family? Lou Smith worked the case as a police constable, and failing to find Scarlett has been one of the biggest regrets of her career. No one is more shocked than Lou to learn that Scarlett has unexpectedly been found during a Special Branch raid of a brothel in Briarstone.

Lou and her Major Crime team are already stretched working two troubling cases: nineteen-year-old Ian Palmer was found badly beaten; and soon after, bar owner Carl McVey was found half-buried in the woods, his Rolex and money gone. While Lou tries to establish the links between the two cases, DS Sam Hollands works with Special Branch to question Scarlett. What happened to her? Where has she been until now? How did she end up back here? And why is her family–with the exception of her emotionally fragile younger sister, Juliette–less than enthusiastic about her return?

When another brutal assault and homicide are linked to the McVey murder, Lou’s cases collide, and the clues all point in one terrifying direction. As the pressure and the danger mount, it becomes clear that the silent, secretive Scarlett holds the key to everything.

My Review:

The case in this story is fascinating and incredibly chilling. Both the detective and the victim are women worth watching, although in completely different ways.

Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Louisa Smith’s first case as a new DCI was told in Under a Silent Moon (reviewed here). It was a story where we both see into the intimate details of police procedures and watch as DCI Smith learns how to be a boss instead of just one of the truths.

She makes mistakes in both her personal and her professional life, but she gets the case mostly solved – some of it touches on organized crime organizations that have been operating for years, so just one case, no matter how big and bloody, is not enough to bring everyone involved to justice.

But while Smith is still tying up loose ends from that case, one of her very first cases as a Detective Constable, ten years ago, crawls out of the past and into the present. And it has ties to the organized crime case she is still trying to wrap up.

Scarlett Rainsford was 15 in 2003. She disappeared from a family vacation in Greece, and was never heard from again. Based on the evidence at the time, it was believed that she had been killed and her body never found.

In 2013 her body, very much still alive, is discovered in a sex trafficking sting near her parents’ home. Scarlett is not herself a prostitute, but she is working in a brothel and certainly knows what’s going on. The question is how she got there.

We see Scarlett’s story in flashbacks to her abduction and later life. Considering where she is found, it is not a complete surprise how she got there. What catches you by the throat is why she got there.

Not that she is telling, because she is keeping as quiet as possible. She doesn’t want to reveal what she knows about the brothel, and she doesn’t want to go back to her parents. (She’s 25 now and doesn’t have to.)

DCI Smith is now leading the investigation into how Scarlett got trafficked back to Britain, and where the original investigation went wrong. What she uncovers is a cesspit of lies, all leading back to Scarlett’s parents.

We’re not sure until the very end exactly what started Scarlett down the path to where she ends up, but we know it was awful. Her traffickers are neither the first nor the worst people to abuse her in her young life.

All she’s ever wanted is to save her younger sister Juliette. But they are trapped in a situation where no one can truly be saved.

It’s up to DCI Smith and her team to pick up and sort out the bloody pieces.

Escape Rating A-: Smith’s personal life, her hangups about her family and her possibly together possibly apart possibly breaking up relationship with her boyfriend sometimes take focus away from a case that will chill you right down to your toes, and probably keep you awake long after you’ve finished the book.

The real tragedy in this case “is not that it occurred, but that it was allowed.” I’m paraphrasing Dragon Age Origins here, but the situation is horrible in the same way, even if the events are not.

It’s obvious from the very beginning that something is seriously wrong in Scarlett Rainsford’s family. We don’t get the details until the end, but it’s very clear that Clive Rainsford is emotionally and physically abusing his entire family in various ways. Not just the two girls, but also his wife, whom he married when she was 16 and he was 31. Annie Rainsford has no thoughts or opinions of her own, and the girls are beaten if they step just a tiny bit outside the lines he has drawn. Yet to the outside world, they present the picture of the perfect middle class white family, and no one takes a look behind the closed door – not even when Juliette attempts suicide.

It’s clear to DCI Smith that Clive and Annie Rainsford knew more about Scarlett’s disappearance than they ever told the police. Back in 2003, Smith was one of the most junior officers involved in the investigation, and even then she noticed something hinky. Now in 2013, she finds the lies and inconsistencies in the old statements, but it isn’t until the end that Scarlett reveals just how much was left out.

Clive Rainsford was a sick man, and you’re not sorry that he finally gets his just desserts. Not surprised either – only sad that Scarlett and Juliette’s closure is going to ruin the rest of their lives. Although they both may find prison an improvement – which says a lot about the family, and none of it good.

The case, and its investigation, are gripping from beginning to end. At first, I found the flashbacks to the events in 2003 distracting from the narrative, but as we get deeper into both what happened to Scarlett and the current investigation, the two stories merge seamlessly together. We need Scarlett’s perspective in order to see the lies and evasions in her parents’ story. What they said, and what they thought, versus what was actually happening, will make you want to scream and wring someone’s neck. Or curl up into a fetal ball and shake.

Scarlett’s case does tie back into the murder and attempted murder that Smith is investigating at the same time as she is covering the Rainsford case, but just not in the way that anyone expects, which is awesome and horrible at the same time.

The author was inspired to write this book after reading Slave Girl by Sarah Forsyth, a true story of a young English girl who was trafficked into Amsterdam from the UK after she answered an ad for child care workers. Scarlett Rainsford’s fictional story, like Sarah Forsyth’s true-life account, sets out to show that trafficking can happen anywhere to anyone, particularly any female one, and that it happens right under our noses. Behind closed doors.

This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews.

***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

Stacking the Shelves (128)

Posted on March 28, 2015March 27, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Stacking the Shelves

Early this week we went to a lecture/presentation by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the human star of the new Cosmos, among other fascinating achievements. If you are interested in science or space or simply an intelligent presentation, he’s definitely worth seeing if he comes to your city. He was fantastic. And he just added a whole bunch more books to my TBR list.

And if you enjoy urban fantasy but are looking for something just a bit different, A Key, an Egg an Unfortunate Remark by Harry Connolly is awesome!

shadow revolution by clay griffith and susan griffith

undying legion by clay griffith and susan griffith

match for marcus cynster by stephanie laurens

For Review:
Chaos Broken (Chronicles from the Applecross #3) by Rebekah Turner
Day Shift (Midnight, Texas #2) by Charlaine Harris
Desert Rising by Kelley Grant
Homefront (Homefront #1) by Jessica Scott
A Match for Marcus Cynster (Cynsters #23) by Stephanie Laurens
The Shadow Revolution (Crown & Key #1) by Clay Griffith and Susan Griffith
Shards of Hope (Psy-Changeling #14) by Nalini Singh
The Silence that Speaks (Forensic Instincts #4) by Andrea Kane
The Undying Legion (Crown & Key #2) by Clay Griffith and Susan Griffith

Purchased from Amazon:
A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark by Harry Connolly (review)

Review: The Kill List by Nichole Christoff

Posted on March 27, 2015March 26, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B Reviews> book reviews

Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: ebook
Genre: thriller
Series: Jamie Sinclair #1
Length: 247 pages
Publisher: Random House Alibi
Date Released: December 2, 2014
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo

As a top private eye turned security specialist, Jamie Sinclair has worked hard to put her broken marriage behind her. But when her lying, cheating ex-husband, army colonel Tim Thorp, calls with the news that his three-year-old daughter has been kidnapped, he begs Jamie to come find her. For the sake of the child, Jamie knows she can’t refuse. Now, despite the past, she’ll do everything in her power to bring little Brooke Thorp home alive.

Soon Jamie is back at Fort Leeds—the army base in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens where she grew up, the only child of a two-star general—chasing down leads and forging an uneasy alliance with the stern military police commander and the exacting FBI agent working Brooke’s case. But because Jamie’s father is now a U.S. senator, her recent run-in with a disturbed stalker is all over the news, and when she starts receiving gruesome threats echoing the stalker’s last words, she can’t shake the feeling that her investigation may be about more than a missing girl—and that someone very powerful is hiding something very significant . . . and very sinister.

My Review:

I picked this book because I’m signed up for a tour for the second book in the series (The Kill Shot) next week. At least with series that aren’t too far down the path, I like to start from the beginning.

And what a beginning this one is! Wow! What a ride.

Jamie Sinclair is a fascinating point-of-view character. She is a security consultant as well as a private investigator. She also has a not-so-secret penchant for taking cases that involve child kidnapping. Which is how her ex manages to get her involved with his life again – but not in any way that helps him.

Not that he thinks its going to turn out quite the way that it does. Jamie’s interest is in saving the child, what happens with the adults is only her problem if it contributed to the kidnapping or if it gets in her way.

She has just finished up a case that splashed itself in the headlines. A pedophile was stalking a news anchorwoman in Philadelphia and tried to kidnap her two kids. Jamie got the guy, but in the process, he nearly slit her throat and managed to switch his sick fixation from the newswoman to Jamie.

Let’s just say ick.

When her ex calls and practically orders her to come to New Jersey’s Leeds Army Base to help him, she plans to refuse, until he tells her that his 4-year-old daughter has been kidnapped. It doesn’t matter that this child, and his girlfriend’s pregnancy with same, was the cause of their divorce. All that matters to Jamie is the little girl.

Things get messy fast. Jamie and her ex have serious issues that have nothing to do with the kidnapping. He thinks he can order her around because he was psychologically abusive when they were married. It doesn’t work half so well this time around.

The FBI agent assigned to the case is on that she has crossed paths with before on a similar case. The last time she and Kev Jaeger “worked together” the children died because Kev was just a bit too “by the book”. Unfortunately for Jamie, she and Kev had a one-night stand during the emotional depths of the case. Their professional relationship is tempestuous.

The head of the Military Police on base is someone that Jamie would like to get to know a hell of a lot better. But her reaction to Adam Barrett, and vice versa, is not exactly professional. Jamie is very gun shy of overstepping those boundaries after the fiasco with Kev.

And last, but certainly not least in this case, the job that Jamie’s ex Tim Thorp now holds as base commander at Leeds is the job that Jamie’s father, a retired general who is now a U.S. Senator, used to hold. Jamie grew up in the house that her ex now lives in.

This story has a lot of sticky bits. Everyone is connected to everyone else, in multiple ways, and not necessarily in ways that are going to further anyone’s investigation. This is a very closed little world, and familiarity has bred contempt between a whole lot of the participants.

Jamie is looking for the little girl, Brooke, who has juvenile diabetes and is way too young to manage it herself. If her kidnappers don’t know, or don’t care, Brooke will be dead in three days.

The case lasts for a week. Hope fades. But complications arise is flocks.

Because this isn’t about little Brooke. The case is about Jamie’s ex Tim Thorpe and whatever the hell he did to wind up with stacks of cash in his safe. He’s lying to everyone, and it looks like his child has been caught in the crossfire.

Meanwhile, Jamie’s stalker is still out there. A homeless psychotic in Philly couldn’t possibly have a connection to a child abduction case in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. Or could he?

Just like Tim Thorp’s web of lies, this case has a lot more threads than anyone could have imagined.

Escape Rating B+: I liked this story, and I liked Jamie. The thriller aspect kept me pulling out the book in unlikely places just so I could finally find out who done it, and whether I had guessed anything right. (The answer is both yes and no).

I did figure out what Thorp was hiding, and where the money came from. In the end, he’s revealed to be slime, but it is pretty obvious that he is a lying scumbag from the very beginning – it just takes a while to zero in on what he’s lying about that is getting everyone in his orbit shot at and his daughter kidnapped.

Jamie is a terrific character. She has been through a lot, and has emerged strong. Sometimes a little too tough and strong for her own good. But he stands on her own two feet, except when her father enters the picture.

There’s a strong thread in this story about psychological abuse and the effects it has on adult children who have survived. Jamie is not the only person in this story who was abused as a child, and the way that they have each been affected is a key part of figuring out who, and more importantly why, all the perpetrators are in this mess.

It’s also pretty clear that Jamie’s messed up relationship with her father led directly to marriage to another man just like him, so that the cycle continued. Jamie’s better, but I don’t see her as completely out. Her dad’s constant negative opinion of her, even when he is not present, still rules a lot of her behavior.

I even liked the way that Jamie’s potential relationship with MP Adam Barrett is explored slowly and carefully. They both have a lot of baggage that makes relationships difficult. The middle of this case was not a good place to start.

The thing that bothered me about Jamie is that every man she meets seems to fall in love with her. The cop that she regularly works with in Philly is definitely carrying a torch for her, and is both obvious and sad about it. Jamie isn’t encouraging him, but she also still has to work with him and needs his friendship.

The FBI agent Kev Jaeger is also falling all over her, and falls all over himself when Adam Barrett starts showing an interest. Kev’s jealousy gets in the way of the investigation at some points.

Then there’s Adam Barrett. Jamie and Adam meet and fall instantly into something which they both resist as long as they can. While I liked their relationship, it was one too many. If romantic part of this romantic suspense plot was Adam and Jamie, then someone else shouldn’t have been in this picture. Probably the poor, sad Philly cop. He could have been fatherly concerned instead of romantically concerned and still served the same place in the story.

The way that all the cases finally wrapped up held a LOT of surprises. Even though the long arm of coincidence meant that they had to come together in the end, the way they came together caught me by surprise.

***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

Review: Shadow Ritual by Eric Giacometti and Jacques Ravenne

Posted on March 24, 2015March 23, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | A Reviews> blog tours> book reviews

Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, hardcover
Genre: thriller
Series: Antoince Marcas #2
Length: 270 pages
Publisher: Le French Book
Date Released: March 25, 2015
Purchasing Info: Authors’ Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository

An electrifying thriller about the rise of extremism. Two slayings—one in Rome and one in Jerusalem—rekindle an ancient rivalry between modern-day secret societies for knowledge lost at the fall of the Third Reich. Detective Antoine Marcas unwillingly teams up with the strong-willed Jade Zewinski to chase Neo-Nazi assassins across Europe. They must unravel an arcane Freemason mystery, sparked by information from newly revealed KGB files. Inspired from the true story of mysterious Freemason files thought to hold a terrible secret, stolen by the SS in 1940, recovered by the Red Army in 1945 and returned half a century later.

My Review:

This is the second book in the series featuring Antoine Marcas, and based on this entry in the series, I hope that the publisher gets the rest of the series translated tout de suite. Meaning, as fast as the translator Anne Trager can get them out.

Shadow Ritual is edge-of-the-seat thrilling, very much in the vein of The Da Vinci Code but with much better editing. The pace is taut, and the story, even the parts about rituals and history and the secret society background of this mess, moves along at a rapid clip.

Just enough to feel the horror (at the appropriate points), but not so long as to dwell on it.

The prologue takes place at the end of Nazi Germany. One young French SS officer, along with a cadre of fellow fanatics, is tasked with smuggling important papers out of Germany and setting himself up as a sleeper agent in a sympathetic country to wait until his masters need him again. His masters are not exactly the Nazis – but a philosophical splinter group called the Thule. Who manage, in their own evil, world-domination type ways, to be even worse than the Nazis.

Without the extra-terrestrial power boost, the Thule remind me a bit of Red Skull in the first Captain America movie. I know this is just slightly off topic, but the brands of megalomaniacal pure-Aryan BS feel surprisingly similar..

The story in Shadow Ritual moves to the 21st century, and a sudden string of ritual murders. The ritual murders are tied into Freemasonry, a subject that sets more than a few of the investigators as well as the perpetrators into absolute fits, but only the Thule actually foam at the mouth.

The string of murders imitates and corrupts a big piece of Masonic ritual. Someone is killing people, not just Freemasons but anyone connected with the secret being pursued, in a way that sends a calling card to any Masons who see the victims or read about the results.

Antoine Marcas, a detective in the Paris Police, is a Freemason with an interest in Masonic history and documents. When a Masonic researcher is killed at the French Embassy in Italy, Marcas is paired with a hard-boiled Embassy security officer who hates the Masonic Order and anything connected with it.

As partnerships go, this is not a happy one.

But Jade Zewinski’s Foreign Service bosses don’t all love the Masons either, so they are happy to have someone in charge of the investigation who will not report to the Order first. At the same time, they need Marcas because all the clues are steeped in Masonic ritual and don’t make much sense to anyone who is not intimately familiar with the Order.

Their uneasy but ultimately productive partnership unearths a trail of dead bodies – and puts them squarely in the sights of an underground society that blames the Masons, the Jews, and anyone they just plain don’t like for what they see as the suppression of the true World Order – one that puts the Nazi Thule back on top of empire – with everyone else crushed under their heel.

Starting with Marcas and Zewinski.

Escape Rating A: This is one of those books that just grabbed me. I loved the deep dive into unfamiliar history – especially because that exploration was encapsulated into a thriller that kept me enthralled up to the very end.

Part of what made this story work was the two protagonists. They don’t like each other at all. Zewinski is openly hostile about everything that Marcas believes in. And we don’t know why until the very end – just that she acts like a bitch at every turn.

At the same time, they definitely respect each other. Even though she often treats Marcas like dirt, she also respects his abilities as a detective. Likewise, even though Marcas is often infuriated by Zewinski’s attitude and hostility, he also respects her ability to get the job done. He sometimes questions whether she wants to leave him behind, or is hoping that he won’t measure up in some way, but there is certainly mutual respect.

They manage to rely on each other as partners even though they drive each other crazy.

Also, Zewinski is in some ways the stand-in for the audience. The history and mystery that is driving the action is deeply embedded in the Masonic rituals and history. Marcas knows those secrets intimately, and Zewinski has spent her life actively avoiding anything to do with Freemasonry. In order to them to solve the crimes together, he has to explain the mysteries to her, and that provides a logical way to explain them to us.

For most of us, Freemasonry is shrouded in secrets and legends, and it was fascinating to get a glimpse behind the curtain. Lots of stories have exploited this desire to find those secrets, including The Da Vinci Code and the movie National Treasure. Mixing the secrets of the Freemasons with their persecution by the Nazis makes for a chilling read.

Like The DaVinci Code, Shadow Ritual is the second book in the series featuring its code-breaking detective. Also like The DaVinci Code, you don’t need to have read the first book about Antoine Marcas to enjoy the second.

Not that I don’t want the first book. And the rest of the series. ASAP.

***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 3-22-15

Posted on March 22, 2015March 20, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Giveaways> The Sunday Post> Virtual Nightstand> Winner announcement

The Lucky Leprechaun Giveaway Hop ends 3/29, so you still have plenty of time to get lucky with a bunch of wonderful bookish giveaways.

This weekend is the official beginning of Spring. In Atlanta, it has been 70 and sunny, and 50 and rainy, all in the same week. We’ve had both the air conditioning and the furnace on, sometimes on the same day. If there’s one thing that Spring means, it’s changeable weather. I’m starting to think about getting a lounge chair and reading in the backyard for a few weeks, before it gets too hot here.

On this first weekend of Spring, I want to leave you with a little ditty that always makes me smile.

Spring is sprung,
Fall is fell,
Here comes Summer
And it’s hotter than…
Last year.

Coming Next Week:

A Blink of the Screen by Terry Pratchett (review)
Shadow Ritual by Eric Giacometti and Jacques Ravenne (blog tour review + giveaway)
Unchained Memory by Donna S. Frelick (review)
Idol of Bone by Jane Kindred (review)
The Kill List by Nichole Christoff (blog tour review)

Stacking the Shelves (127)

Posted on March 21, 2015March 20, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Stacking the Shelves

I love our cats. I really do. Even when, sometimes especially when, they sit on my morning newspaper or try to get between my eyes and my iPad. That’s adorable. Howsomever, Mellie peed on my clothes last night. (No, I wasn’t wearing them, but still…) It’s moments like this that make me ask, “Why was that again?” in reference to the question, “Why do we keep them around?” But then someone does something cute and the whole thing is self-explanatory.

But someone still needs to explain to my why Mellie only does this to my clothes, and never Galen’s clothes. it’s a mystery.

Of course I’d much rather read than do laundry. But needs must.

selfish shallow and self-absorbed by meghan daum

case of the invisible dog by Diane stingley

night of the highland dragon by isabel cooper

three moments of an explosion by china mieville

For Review:
17 Carnations by Andrew Morton
The Case of the Invisible Dog (Shirley Homes #1) by Diane Stingley
Hard as a Rock (Gargoyles #3) by Christine Warren
Idol of Blood (Looking Glass Gods #2) by Jane Kindred
The Irish Brotherhood by Helen O’Donnell
Last First Snow (Craft Sequence #4) by Max Gladstone
Let Me Die in His Footsteps by Lori Roy
Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian
Night of the Highland Dragon (Highland Dragons #3) by Isabel Cooper
The Race for Paris by Meg Waite Clayton
Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed edited by Meghan Daum
Sharp Shootin’ Cowboy (Hot Cowboy Nights #3) by Victoria Vane
Three Moments of an Explosion by China Mieville
The Thunder of Giants by Joel Fishbane
Zack (Cold Fury Hockey #3) by Sawyer Bennett

Purchased from Amazon:
Neanderthal Seeks Human (Knitting in the City #1) by Penny Reid

Borrowed from the Library:
Butcher’s Hill (Tess Monaghan #3) by Laura Lippman
In a Strange City (Tess Monaghan #6) by Laura Lippman
The Last Place (Tess Monaghan #7) by Laura Lippman

Review: A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear

Posted on March 17, 2015March 16, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews

Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover ebook, audiobook, large print
Genre: historical mystery
Series: Maisie Dobbs #11
Length: 352 pages
Publisher: Harper
Date Released: March 17, 2015
Purchasing Info: Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository

Maisie Dobbs returns in a powerful story of political intrigue and personal tragedy: a brutal murder in the British garrison town of Gilbraltar leads the investigator into a web of lies, deceit and danger

Spring 1937. In the four years since she left England, Maisie Dobbs has experienced love, contentment, stability—and the deepest tragedy a woman can endure. Now, all she wants is the peace she believes she might find by returning to India. But her sojourn in the hills of Darjeeling is cut short when her stepmother summons her home to England; her aging father Frankie Dobbs is not getting any younger.

But on a ship bound for England, Maisie realizes she isn’t ready to return. Against the wishes of the captain who warns her, “You will be alone in a most dangerous place,” she disembarks in Gibraltar. Though she is on her own, Maisie is far from alone: the British garrison town is teeming with refugees fleeing a brutal civil war across the border in Spain.

Yet the danger is very real. Days after Maisie’s arrival, a photographer and member of Gibraltar’s Sephardic Jewish community, Sebastian Babayoff, is murdered, and Maisie becomes entangled in the case, drawing the attention of the British Secret Service. Under the suspicious eye of a British agent, Maisie is pulled deeper into political intrigue on “the Rock”—arguably Britain’s most important strategic territory—and renews an uneasy acquaintance in the process. At a crossroads between her past and her future, Maisie must choose a direction, knowing that England is, for her, an equally dangerous place, but in quite a different way.

My Review:

Compared to how much I loved the two other books in the Maisie Dobbs series that I have read, Maisie Dobbs (reviewed here) and Leaving Everything Most Loved (reviewed here), I have some very mixed feelings about A Dangerous Place.

It certainly is dangerous – Maisie is in Gibraltar in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. While the war did not touch Gibraltar directly, refugees fled into or through the city every day. Sometimes a trickle, sometimes in droves. The British officialdom at this normally quiet and tiny outpost of the Empire was officially overwhelmed.

And Maisie throws herself into the middle of the mess, because it is preferable to throwing herself into the arms of death, one way or another. At the end of her rope, she finds purpose again in Gibraltar by going back to her own beginnings, at least professionally.

Why is Maisie so close to self-destruction? That’s the hard part of this story. It has been four years since the end of Leaving Everything Most Loved, and in that intervening period, Maisie has been surprisingly happily married, pregnant, miscarried and widowed. All those harrowing events are dealt with in a series of letters that form the first chapter of the book.

Maisie spends the entire rest of the story dealing with her overwhelming grief while trying to put the pieces of her life back together. It is a harrowing chain of events, and Maisie is still not past them enough to even function. She is on her way back to England from India when she realizes that she cannot yet bear the thought of seeing all the places that she and James knew together, so she disembarks at Gibraltar in order to prevent being overcome by her own depression.

Only Maisie could find a dead body under these circumstances, but find one she does. And slowly, reluctantly, Maisie takes on the unofficial case of determining how and why Sebastian Babayoff really died. Was he just a victim of a desperate refugee and unfortunate circumstances? Or, as Maisie begins to suspect was Babayoff murdered because he was a young, foolish and occasionally intrepid photographer who took the right picture at the very much wrong time.

As Maisie investigates, she begins her return to the practices that her mentor Maurice Blanche instilled in her before she fell in love with James or even thought that she might marry someday. Taking up the threads of her old profession helps her to root herself back into the person she was before tragedy struck her life. She is keen to hunt down the truth, and to befuddle the agents of the British Secret Service who are tailing her, seemingly at the request of her father-in-law and for her own good.

Maisie has never had much truck with people who attempt to do things for her supposed own good, especially when they neglect to consult her about what that good might be. But she still feels herded and manipulated at every turn.

With good reason – the Secret Service is attempting to herd her towards a conclusion of their making. In the end, Maisie understands much, but does not completely condone their reasoning.

And at last she finds a purpose that she can believe in again for herself. So she gives everyone the slip and returns to a profession in which she can do the greatest good, and hopefully find her way back to a self that can carry on.

Escape Rating B+: As I said at the beginning, A Dangerous Place gave me a lot of mixed feelings. That being said, I still love Maisie herself and I remain very interested in her journey.

However, I found the way that the author dealt with the tumultuous years between Leaving Everything Most Loved and A Dangerous Place left me feeling a bit short-changed. While I realize that the Maisie Dobbs series is mostly about Maisie’s cases and not about Maisie’s love life, events that cause so many profound changes and her and her circumstances deserve more than a few letters.

I would love to have seen a book where Maisie solves a case in Canada during the time of her marriage that allowed the author to cover the tragedies and still tell a Maisie story. I like Maisie and wanted to be there for her and with her. I say this fully recognizing that this is the author’s series and not mine and that it is up to her to write the books her way. But I missed the sense of following along with Maisie during those four eventful years.

And because we weren’t with Maisie, we see her grief at second hand, instead of being in there with her. She talks about it and feels it (and occasionally takes morphine for it) but we are standing outside it and wondering when she is going to pick herself and get on with things. Because the Maisie we know and often love is a person who gets on with things no matter what.

The circumstances in Gibraltar are incredibly murky. History tells us that the Spanish Civil War was a proxy war for the Great Powers before the start of World War II. And even though we know that Britain’s policy in the Chamberlain years was to appease Nazi Germany at all costs, it is hard to see those costs being weighed up in lives lost and villages destroyed.

The bombing of the Spanish/Basque village of Guernica that drives so many people to action in the story was immortalized in a famous painting by Pablo Picasso, also titled Guernica. The world tour of the painting brought the attention of the world to the Spanish Civil War, just as the action itself brings the war home to so many people in the story.

But Maisie spends a lot of the time in A Dangerous Place muddled and confused. While taking on Sebastian Babayoff’s case brings her out of herself and out of her depression, she has a difficult time picking her way through the loose threads and the dangling red herrings placed in her way by the British Secret Service. Her confusion becomes ours, and in the end Babayoff himself is lost. We have come to expect more from Maisie.

The ending of the case is not satisfying. The ends have been forced to justify the means by the exigencies of an empire that is fading. What does satisfy is the way that Maisie takes charge of her own life at the end, even if she has to run away again in order to achieve it.

I am looking forward to more of Maisie’s adventures. Now that the Secret Service has her fixed in their sights, I expect her to do some very interesting and hush hush work for the Government in the impending war.

This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews.

***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.

The Sunday Post AKA What’s on my (Mostly Virtual) Nightstand 3-15-15

Posted on March 15, 2015March 14, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Giveaways> The Sunday Post> Virtual Nightstand> Winner announcement

As far as reviewing books goes, it was a damn good week until the announcement of Terry Pratchett’s death. I had been feeling a bit guilty that I wasn’t quite caught up in the Discworld, but now – it just means that I have a few more treats left to enjoy before I run out. I discovered the Discworld during the period when I had a long commute and went through a lot of audiobooks. My first exposure was a recording of The Color of Magic. The world has never looked the same since. I am forever grateful for the concept of “the other leg of the trousers of time” which makes me smile and feels amazingly true all at the same time. I use the phrase (possibly a bit too) often.

And if these things come in threes, it’s going to be pretty awful. After losing both Nimoy and Pratchett, just the thought of who might be third gives me the shakes.

Back to the current crop of books. If you enjoy historical mysteries at all, you will love the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear. I mean it.

Current Giveaways:

The Dead Key by D.M. Pulley

Winner Announcements:

The winner of The First Time in Forever by Sarah Morgan is Anne.

Blog Recap:

B Review: The Dead Key by D.M. Pulley + Giveaway
A- Review: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
A Review: Leaving Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear
B+ Review: Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman
A Review: A Touch of Stardust by Kate Alcott
Stacking the Shelves (126)

Coming Next Week:

Guest Post by Author Blair McDowell + Giveaway
Lucky Leprechaun Giveaway Hop
A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear (blog tour review)
Cowboy Heaven by Cheryl Brooks (blog tour review)
Star Trek: Shadow of the Machine by Scott Harrison (review)
Cranky Ladies of History edited by Tansy Rayner Roberts and Tehani Wessely (review)

Stacking the Shelves (126)

Posted on March 14, 2015March 13, 2015 by Marlene Harris | Author : Marlene Harris | Stacking the Shelves

For anyone who hasn’t seen the news, this is the second week in a row where the science fiction and fantasy world has lost someone near and dear. On Thursday, Sir Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, died of complications from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. He was 66, which is much, much too young. He left behind a legacy of fascinating, bizarre and humorous views of our world, as told through the lens of his Discworld series. His last tweets tell a story of Death from the Discworld coming for him. And of course Death came for him personally, because in the Discworld, Death always comes in person to escort wizards to whatever is beyond.