Thursday, September 24, 2015

Series and serious

The Lost Colonies of Ancient America: A Comprehensive Guide to the Pre-Columbian Visitors that Really Discovered America by Frank Joseph.  How far did I get, about page 25?  I just can't take this author seriously: he quotes heavily from trade magazines, and all his photo credits list Wikipedia.  Cool topic, but find a different book.


The Execution and half of The Ultimatum by Dick Wolf.  This, combined with wherever I ended up in the Jim Butcher series,put into a two-week funk.  In the case of this series, there is an awful lot of plot, which is almost enough to carry it along.  Characters are fairly well-developed, enough red-herrings to keep the reader guessing.  What killed it for me is how poorly-integrated any needed information is.  It wasn't too bad in the first one, but the more conspiracies the author brings in, the more information needs to be set up, and he just cannot do it.  Super bummer.

White Night, Small Favor, Turn Coat, Changes, Ghost Story, and half of Cold Days by Jim Butcher.  These are very quick reads, because they are so repetitive... depressingly so.  The reason this series (well, let's call it from Turn Coat onwards) contributed so heavily to my funk is because the characters are all in a bad situation, several of them have made stupid bad decisions, and they author can't pull them out while keeping to the story arc in less than at least 3 more books.  I guess I'll wait for those books to be written before giving them another shot.

And Only To Deceive by Tasha Alexander.  Not too bad for a series opener-- we get a pretty good idea of the setting and the main character.  I consider it a problem that the possible-love-interest-turned-bad-guy and the possible-bad-guy-turned-love-interest were virtually identical.  I'll give book 2 a shot, hoping that the remaining characters gain a little more depth.

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