“Welcome to the Bestiary! Unusual Pets for Unusual People!” A pet store quite unlike any you’ve ever seen!
SIX is the story of a large breed dog, a VE “Welcome to the Bestiary! Unusual Pets for Unusual People!” A pet store quite unlike any you’ve ever seen!
SIX is the story of a large breed dog, a VERY large breed dog, whose size means she’s a pretty tough sell from the Bestiary. Just as it seems the owner has become resigned to the idea of Six being a permanent store resident, Six escapes through a door thoughtlessly left open and, for the first time, becomes a wild stray forced to live on her own and feed herself through her own best canine devices.
SIX’s story is told by a third person narrator who personifies the novel’s heroine without anthropomorphizing her. She definitely thinks like a dog, has dog reactions to a dog’s perception of the stimuli around her and, if dogs could talk, Six’s conversations seem eminently reasonable for a loose dog in an urban setting. SIX is certainly a fantasy and is likely well-characterized as a young adult novel but the simpler fact is this – if you’re a lover of paws, fur, and their owners, you’ll find SIX a fast-paced, thoroughly entertaining and utterly heartwarming read. If you’re not an animal person … well, just save yourself the trouble and find another book to read!
JS Veter’s vision of doggie heaven after Six prevents a young boy from being hit by a car is particularly well-done and will certainly put a knowing, appreciative smile on the face of any animal lover!
Definitely recommended. Kudos to a Canadian author who, although she likely doesn’t know it, is a neighbour within a stone’s throw of my home.
“The nuclear destruction … drifted down out of the atmosphere and settled on a lonely grave in the Quebec woods …"
The news out of Colorado was bey“The nuclear destruction … drifted down out of the atmosphere and settled on a lonely grave in the Quebec woods …"
The news out of Colorado was beyond bad. Case zero! The unthinkable had happened. A virulent plague with the ability to kill within minutes was spreading with astonishing speed. The minuscule handful of infected carriers who survived a near 100% mortality rate all but guaranteed the spread of the plague across the entirety of North and South America. Gene Arnprior made a snap foresighted survivalist decision to flee with his family to an isolated wilderness location in northern Quebec. THE LAST CANADIAN is the tragic, poignant, but nevertheless compelling and exciting story of Arnprior’s survival, his cross-country search for other possible survivors and, having discovered the cause of the plague’s inception, his desperate attempts to revenge the death of his family and his fellow citizens.
Notwithstanding his background as an engineer, Arnprior’s ability to jerry-rig machinery and to survive in the face of threats up to and including artillery bombardment and nuclear weapons stretched this reader’s credibility well beyond the breaking point. In addition, I thought Heine’s description of machinery, roads, airplanes, boats, and buildings to be in a usable state with only a modicum of repair after a five year onslaught of nature’s advances with zero human maintenance to be more than a little hopeful and querulously eyebrow-raising.
That said, the story, reminiscent of the 1963 television series THE PRISONER, was readable and enjoyable. And the ending, with definite similarities to Eugene Burdick’s cold war suspense thriller FAIL SAFE, was brilliant and totally satisfying. Although the description of those cold war politics and inter-governmental relations between the USA, Britian, Russia, and China, were somewhat dated, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend THE LAST CANADIAN to any reader.
“… a series of short stories with twists and turns meant to unhinge minds and pull on heartstrings.”
When I reviewed an earlier collection of Ms K “… a series of short stories with twists and turns meant to unhinge minds and pull on heartstrings.”
When I reviewed an earlier collection of Ms King’s short stories, TRULY UNFORTUNATE, I wasn’t shy about heaping on a helping of 5-star praise and kudos:
TRULY UNFORTUNATE is definitely a blend of genres – paranormal, horror, psychological thriller, and murder mystery. … Drawing on whiffs of the supernatural abilities of Stephen King’s eponymous character CARRIE, C.A. King places Truly [DeCanter] at the heart of a pattern of unexplained deaths in Knollville. The police investigators acknowledge that the solution to the mystery, if it is even possible to find one, lies beyond the realm of normal human experience.
[A small piece of foreshadowing, I believed, that hinted the investigators themselves to be beyond that aforementioned realm of normal human experience]…
TRULY UNFORTUNATE is short and sweet but it’s a gripping page-turner and a novel that will definitely raise your eyebrows with hopes to follow up on further entries in the series. And, more than that, I’ll definitely be looking for other novels by the same author.
And so, as you might imagine, it was with considerable anticipation that I opened the pages of FREAKY FINALES, a recently published anthology of Ms King’s shorts that obviously promised what I hoped would be some unforeseen clever endings. And it was with even more considerable disappointment that I discovered the near novella length RESPECT, sub-titled AN ANGEL’S FALL FROM HEAVEN, to be little more than a maudlin philosophical essay on the origin and nature of angels and Ms King’s imaginings with regard to the musings of a capricious God. This was a stand-alone God clearly based in the Christian beliefs of monotheism and the unknowable motivations of that God in his creation of such things as death, disease, hardship, and negative emotions!
Consider this conversation between God and one of his angels, defined in truly appalling Mother Teresa fashion as “…a person who has been left bone-weary by life, but still retails their inner beauty and compassion, shining brightly” in which God justifies his creation of the vagaries and difficulties which mortals must face as an implicit part of their mortality:
“Do you actually consider being mortal a gift?”
God sighed. “I consider giving you the freedom to choose a gift. I think having emotions is a gift. There are many benefits to being human.”
“And downsides!” Xarlapin exclaimed [the angel facing incipient “demotion” to mortal status] “What about negative emotions like sadness, pain, jealousy, and death?”
“They serve their purposes,” God answered, stroking his long beard. “Without death, there is no life. Without sickness, there is no health. Without sadness, one would never know true happiness. There is a balance to everything.”
Frankly, my admittedly long-standing atheist opinion characterizes that as apologist theistic codswallop with a particularly Christian bent! And it gets worse. Having already insisted on the paradoxical notion of allowing her omnipotent God to craft human creatures with free will and the power to make decisions of which he has no foreknowledge and over which he has no power or say, she continues to make that God fundamentally homophobic:
“God chuckled. “You’ve already made your first choice as a mortal. You decided you wanted to be a man, not a woman.”
He [Xarlapin, now a mortal "he" as opposed to a genderless angel] glanced down. “I don’t remember doing that”.
“Your subconscious took charge there,” God snickered. “I expect it’s because of your feelings for a certain professor.”
Clearly it was beyond Ms King’s God’s limited imagination to see that love for that female professor need not necessarily emanate from a man.
To make a long story short, RESPECT was not well-crafted horror or a paranormal short story with a twist ending that pulled on my heartstrings. It was nothing more than tedious, pedantic proselytizing and I have now put paid to reading anything further by Ms King despite the previous praise I offered to her work when it was unsullied by such nonsense.
“One road in, no road out …” Wayward Pines was definitely not typical Smalltown USA!
Recovering from a brief bout with amnesia after an apparent car “One road in, no road out …” Wayward Pines was definitely not typical Smalltown USA!
Recovering from a brief bout with amnesia after an apparent car crash, Secret Service Agent Ethan Burke shakily picks up where he left off – the search for two missing fellow agents, one of whom is a woman with whom he had a brief relationship that almost destroyed his marriage. But Wayward Pines is not the utopian small town that it appears to be. And Sheriff Arnold Pope, the local representative of law enforcement, and Dr Jenkins are obviously a good deal more than a police officer and a benevolent small town general practitioner.
Reminiscent of the 1967 British television series THE PRISONER, and HG Wells' wildly popular classic THE TIME MACHINE, Blake Crouch’s PINES, the opening novel in a trilogy, is a brilliant, compelling, sci-fi tale which will enchant its readers with a dark and deeply disturbing horror story of evolution, dystopia, genocide, and government overreach.
If like me, you’re a latecomer to the party and you’ve yet to read PINES, a novel that is now deservedly honored and revered as a dark cult classic, hie thee to your local purveyor of literature and get set for a high speed chiller. You’re definitely in for a treat.
“You can’t go to the prom. What would people think?”
When I reviewed PIECES OF HER, the debut novel in a new series introducing Andrea Oliver, a y“You can’t go to the prom. What would people think?”
When I reviewed PIECES OF HER, the debut novel in a new series introducing Andrea Oliver, a young woman with a troubled past and a less than loving relationship with her mother, I didn’t pull any punches:
“For Karin Slaughter's sake, I fervently hope that PIECES OF HER is that rock-bottom effort which will make anything else she produces look better by comparison.”
I’ll admit it took a great deal of self-persuasion to pick up the next novel in the series, GIRL, FORGOTTEN, in which Oliver, now a newly minted US Marshall is assigned to the protection of a federal judge in the face of death threats. But all’s well that ends well. Karin Slaughter rewarded my courage with a brilliant thriller that unfolded along two timelines separated by forty years and all is DEFINITELY forgiven. I’m back on the “looking forward to further Karin Slaughter novels” list.
The first case, obviously, was the resolution of the death threat issue with respect to the judge but it was the historical case that really put GIRL, FORGOTTEN over the top. Slaughter developed the stone cold case of the rape and murder of a late 20th century teen girl with a veritable bucketful of accompanying bells and whistles – teen cliques, friendships, and the intensity of young love; misogyny; date rape and statutory rape; abortion; the miserable treatment of pregnant teens as little as forty years ago; and, believe it or not, cults and human trafficking. Emily Vaughn, the pregnant teen whose murder was to wait four decades for a solution definitely stole the show. A thoroughly brilliant bit of characterization!
Well done, Karin Slaughter. Definitely recommended. When is the sequel coming? The circumstances of the ending and the intentionally frayed endings on some of the undone knots make it crystal clear that one is in the works!
A thoroughly enjoyable somewhat tongue-in-cheek ghost story delivered in Mark Leslie's inimitable fashion with a clever ending anDon't forget the tip!
A thoroughly enjoyable somewhat tongue-in-cheek ghost story delivered in Mark Leslie's inimitable fashion with a clever ending and a dollop of humour along the way. The takeaway message for the reader just has to be to never forget to tip the pizza delivery guy!...more
Good writing “succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head.”
MalcoGood writing “succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head.”
Malcolm Gladwell expressed this idea (and his hopes for a reader’s takeaway) in his forward to WHAT THE DOG SAW, a collection of his favourite essays, “even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’d really like to be.”
Well, this reader was absolutely thrilled to his toes by this brief trip into Malcolm Gladwell’s mind and his evocative, thought-provoking, and eyebrow-raising collection of ideas on a very eclectic range of topics – flavours of mustard and ketchup; the inevitability of disaster in investment strategy; hiring practices and policies, and the efficacy of job interviews; crime, pit bulls, and dog whispering; criminal profiling; the subtle differences between choking and panicking; the history of birth control pills; and much, much more.
The essays are a little bit too long to be considered as toilet reading but if you’d like to add a non-fiction book to your reading that can be taken in wonderfully enjoyable one or two hour long bite-sized chunks and read side-by-side with your favourite suspense thriller without being the least bit disruptive, then WHAT THE DOG SAW will do the trick in spades! (LOL, trick in spades? See what I did there?)
Given the left/right head-butting that is currently taking place in the USA over issues of a female’s rights to autonomy over their own bodies, the article on reproductive health and mammography is particularly timely and poignant.
As Gladwell said, you might not agree with his opinions, but it would be impossible to read WHAT THE DOG SAW without being moved to deeper thought on your own opinions and gaining a serious helping of reading pleasure in the process. Definitely recommended.
“It wasn’t just a young, pretty, and smart woman driving away that night;”
“... she was a bookmark in the novel that was his life, showing him where h“It wasn’t just a young, pretty, and smart woman driving away that night;”
“... she was a bookmark in the novel that was his life, showing him where he was currently and holding the place from where the story could or should be started again.”
It’s tough not to gush about the sheer brilliance of COLD! A straight-up horror novel by a Canadian aboriginal author that riffs on some not unexpected aboriginal themes – university level indigenous studies programs; racism and xenophobia; hockey as a typical sport for aboriginal young men; isolation of northern aboriginal communities; and, of course, survival in that most contemptible of institutions, government and church run residential schools.
The horror? Well, what else? Serial murder and a man-eating wendigo, described in Wikipedia as “a supernatural being belonging to the spiritual traditions of Algonquian-speaking First Nations in North America. Wendigos are described as powerful monsters that have a desire to kill and eat their victims. In most legends, humans transform into wendigos because of their greed or weakness.”
And the title COLD? Well, aside from the generic widespread association of cold weather with Canada, “the wendigo was a personification of cold and hunger in a time when human survival relied on banding together and sharing resources, particularly during the long, harsh winters of the northern wilderness.”
And the nature of the wendigo curse? ”The curse transforms any person who eats human flesh of another human being in the Canadian wilderness into a massive, fur-covered humanoid beast with fangs and razor sharp claws.”
COLD is a murder mystery, a suspense thriller, a police procedural, a brilliant portrayal of a handful of compelling characters, a dollop of humour that never seems out of place or capable of disrupting the flow of an extremely high-speed narrative stemming from a plane crash in the Canadian sub-arctic AND some very, very skilled atmospheric writing. Kudos to a Canadian author who is definitely on my radar screen for future reading.
“The science of therapy is knowing what to do. The art is knowing what not to do.”
Well, there certainly can’t be any faulting the insightful psych“The science of therapy is knowing what to do. The art is knowing what not to do.”
Well, there certainly can’t be any faulting the insightful psychologist, Alex Delaware, and his quietly homosexual friend, LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, for their longevity, for their popularity and for their dogged determination in bringing all manner of perps to justice. UNNATURAL HISTORY is a murder thriller that deals with themes of wealth versus homelessness and poverty and how, in the mindset of wealth and privilege, altruism can be something less than it ought to be. It may even turn out to be nothing more than exploitation.
But in my reading reality, interest in Delaware and Sturgis’s exploits is fading as their exploits seem to be more dogged and determined than compelling – workmanlike and pedestrian without ever stooping to outright boring, if you will. I’ve also got serious eyebrow raising reservations as to the extent to which author Jonathan Kellerman portrays a psychologist Delaware - who is, after all, only a civilian – as participating directly in police investigations and situations which would be considered as extremely dangerous. I should think that, in a real world operation, Sturgis would be called onto the carpet and severely reprimanded for making such a decision.
Over the years, I’ve accumulated as many as ten to twelve Kellerman titles which have languished unread on my bookshelves. I’ve reached the decision that one more is my limit. If THAT one is more of a grab-you-by-the-throat thriller, I’ll carry on. Otherwise, the entire lot are destined for the local Little Free Library boxes.
“She told me children were nothing but padlocks on the patriarchal shackles of marriage.”
May I recommend THE DEATH OF MRS WESTAWAY as mandatory re“She told me children were nothing but padlocks on the patriarchal shackles of marriage.”
May I recommend THE DEATH OF MRS WESTAWAY as mandatory reading for the likes of JD Vance? Sorry, I haven’t even started and already I digress!
As mystery or drama novel plots go, wills, inheritance and issues related to a bequest are tropes that have been used, re-used, re-packaged and virtually beaten to death by authors in veritable droves. Dickens got it right (and then some) with BLEAK HOUSE, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, and OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, for example. Wilkie Collins smashed it out of the proverbial park with THE WOMAN IN WHITE. Daphne DuMaurier blends Gothic atmosphere with the paranormal to produce a classic in REBECCA. The cozy mystery genre was uplifted by Hercule Poirot’s prognostications in Agatha Christie’s THE CASE OF THE MISSING WILL.
However, for me, and this is strictly my opinion, THE DEATH OF MRS WESTAWAY simply isn’t in the same league as these gems. While she succeeded in creating a handful of memorable gothic moments, the highest praise that I could offer it is to suggest that it is workmanlike and passably entertaining. The notion of an impoverished young woman in the threatening grips of loan sharks making the decision to commit fraud to benefit from a will in which she appears to have an interest has legs out of the starting gate but it fails to ever reach the level of complelling.
“For more than half a century, there [was] no manned presence on the lunar surface. That was about to change …”
One of my fondest and most vivid read“For more than half a century, there [was] no manned presence on the lunar surface. That was about to change …”
One of my fondest and most vivid reading memories is my first reading of Tom Clancy’s THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, arguably English literature’s first techno-thriller. I recall holding my breath, eyes wide and eyebrows raised, and swallowing deeply as defecting Soviet submarine Captain Marko Ramius played a deadly silent game of hide and seek in the mountainous undersea terrain of the Reykjanes Ridge off the coast of Iceland. EAGLE STATION riffs on the same themes by moving that international chess match into the air, into space, and onto the surface of the moon, as a Sino-Soviet alliance wages covert (and officially undeclared but very, very hot) warfare (with extreme prejudice) against the USA over control of the lunar surface and the mining of the moon’s helium-3 resources.
There is no shortage of brilliantly exploited, fast-paced themes here to thrill even the most hard-core technology, political, and military junkies – hard-nosed international diplomacy; deployment of the recently created US Space Force; hard-core military tit for tat that treads ever closer to the boundary of a declared world war; high speed aerial battles; advances in weaponry that would make your head spin; and, of course, government decision making under the stress of all of these conditions.
EAGLE STATION is a snap to recommend to fellow readers and the latest nominee for my Top Ten of 2024 reading list.
On a side note as we rapidly approach the fateful November day on which the US will decide whether its future will include democracy and the rule of law, I shuddered when I tried to imagine a certain Donald J Trump in place of EAGLE STATION’s president, John Dalton Farrell. The possible results for the world as I pictured Trump making decisions in the same scenarios were simply terrifying. Food for thought … !
A jaw-dropping exposé of the realities of American presidential politics and US voting culture!
The premise of NO SAFE PLACE is simplicity itself. It’A jaw-dropping exposé of the realities of American presidential politics and US voting culture!
The premise of NO SAFE PLACE is simplicity itself. It’s a fictional biography of Kerry Kilcannon from a rough and tumble youngster, the child of Irish immigrants, through to his election as a senator climaxing with his contesting the crucial battleground of the California primary as the Democrat nominee for president. It’s dramatic, provocative, evocative, frightening, gut-wrenching, compelling and awesome in its realistic depiction of the insanity that is the American electoral system.
A handful of quotations will serve to portray the flavor of Patterson’s brilliant achievement:
On the character, capabilities, and competence of 20th century politicians: “Politicians were … petty men taking small chances for selfish reasons, trying to manipulate just enough of a cynical public to keep themselves in office.” or “A candidate should make speeches … not decisions. Decisions are too important.” and the succinct characterization “… everything that’s wrong with politics in the nineties – cowardice masked as cleverness, leadership b poll, symbolic gestures, careful attention to special interests.”
One might go so far as to say that NO SAFE PLACE was a door-stopper size condemnation of the entire political process in the USA which, in my opinion, is eminently warranted and absolutely deserved.
On racism and illegal immigration: “You and I will never live to see the day that being a white guy isn’t a better deal. And you have illegals in California partly because whites want cheap labor.”
On the 2nd Amendment: “The notion that James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights so that racists and sociopaths and madmen could slaughter innocent men, women, and children with assault weapons or handguns is one of the most contemptible notions that an irresponsible minority has ever crammed down the throats of its potential victims.”
On electioneering and political campaigning: “ … we have a ‘shoot to kill’ political culture premised on permanent scandal, where people in both parties don’t just try to win but to destroy each other with charges and countercharges. And I’ve stopped counting the number of special prosecutors there are.” (Aileen Cannon, are you paying attention? But I digress!)
On the country’s attitude toward its own military and veterans: “One of the ugliest truths of Vietnam was that the Americans who died there were disproportionately poor, disproportionately black, disproportionately less educated. And one of its ugliest legacies is the elitist notion the only men and women who now need serve our country are those for whom the military is a jobs program.”
Electoral reform, abortion, right-to-life and evangelical Christianity (obviously) popped up their heads repeatedly for consideration in a novel that, in a single phrase, needs to be read.
A great debut to what promises to be a creepy (and thoroughly entertaining) series!
TRULY UNFORTUNATE is definitely a blend of genres – paranormal, hoA great debut to what promises to be a creepy (and thoroughly entertaining) series!
TRULY UNFORTUNATE is definitely a blend of genres – paranormal, horror, psychological thriller, and murder mystery. Whether there is intent or malevolence remains an open question, even as the novel reaches its closing pages, but it is certainly true (as the title coyly suggests) that one would be truly unfortunate if one was to upset Truly DeCanter, a young girl apparently suffering from repressed memories of childhood abuse.
Drawing on whiffs of the supernatural abilities of Stephen King’s eponymous character CARRIE, C.A. King places Truly at the heart of a pattern of unexplained deaths in Knollville. The police investigators acknowledge that the solution to the mystery, if it is even possible to find one, lies beyond the realm of normal human experience.
TRULY UNFORTUNATE is short and sweet but it’s a gripping page-turner and a novel that will definitely raise your eyebrows with hopes to follow up on further entries in the series. And, more than that, I’ll definitely be looking for other novels by the same author. Kudos to an up and coming Canadian author I had the good fortune to meet at a recent local book festival.
“There were riots in Paris, but there are always riots in Paris”
Post-apocalyptic and dystopian, cynical, cautionary, satirical, hilarious, concern“There were riots in Paris, but there are always riots in Paris”
Post-apocalyptic and dystopian, cynical, cautionary, satirical, hilarious, concerned, realistic, evocative, ominous, thought-provoking … MR ADAM is all of the above and a good deal more besides.
Consider a hypothetical world in which a nuclear accident sterilizes every man on the planet except Mr Adam, a rather unassuming, mildly introverted man with a definite case of low self-esteem, who happened to be working deep in a mine shielded by vast quantities of lead deposits at the time of the accident. Pat Frank’s brilliant (but hopefully not prescient) tale tells the disconcerting story of a shocked world’s reactions to the situation from a variety of possible perspectives – young vs old; male vs female; government or military vs citizens; nation vs nation; and, of course, Mr Adams vs the rest of the world who see artificial insemination (with him as the sole source of semen) as the only possibility for the continuation of the human race (as if that is necessarily a good thing, LOL!).
Easy, easy, easy to recommend to other readers and a definite incentive to explore Pat Frank’s more widely known classic, ALAS, BABYLON.
A dead end street – nine houses, nine neighbours, nine creepy little horror shorts!
The host of a street dinner party makes the startling revelation toA dead end street – nine houses, nine neighbours, nine creepy little horror shorts!
The host of a street dinner party makes the startling revelation to his guests that the original residents of their houses were a coven of nine witches who made a pact to keep “the spirits bound to the other realm”. But, in time, that magic has been weakening, “barely holding on by a thread”. If the residents fail to strengthen the number nine in their lives, then the resulting failure of that binding could free those spirits. “Terrible things could happen on Nine Street”. And THAT is the basis for a thoroughly entertaining collection of tales indeed!
TWISTED TALES OF A DEAD END STREET is a bravura collection of fast-paced horror shorts with themes of murder, animal abuse, paranormal, and malevolent spirits delivered with humour, a cast of characters with tongue-in-cheek Dickensian names, and suitably gothic atmosphere. Although each of the chapters stands on its own merits as a compelling short story, the linkage between the stories provides the basis for a clever ending twist in the final chapter.
This is the first of three books that I purchased when I met the author at a local book fair. I’m definitely looking forward to the other two and I’m thrilled to have made the acquaintance of such a skilled local author that I can happily recommend to fellow readers.
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