caught up

Acadie by Dave Hutchinson.  Another book that was a pretty good read until the penultimate scene, when it totally fell apart.  There are some world details that are skipped over in the early part of the book, which the reader can excuse as a necessity of the very short format.  The last encounter, however, was very poorly managed.  It is probably supposed to throw the reader for a loop, but it doesn't fit.  There's no reason for the story to end that way.  The frustrating thing is, this could have been a pretty good story if the author had taken more time and more pages to build the world, to drop in some suspicions, and to give a reason for the twist ending.  Making it super short did everyone a great disservice.

Star trek: Voyager, seasons 6 and 7, with Kate Mulgrew.  Star trek good, Star wars bad.  Voyager better than DS9.  Writers: stop trying to use time travel; it is a bad idea, and a bad plot device. 

Burn notice, seasons 1-4, with Jeffrey Donovan.  This is what I've been doing in the evenings while the boys are watching LotR and playing chess.  It's a really good match for people who like White collar: mostly-good people with questionably-legal skills use said techniques to foil actual bad guys.  This series comes off a little darker, though: they find the bad guys and stop them, but stopping them usually involves pitting them against each other and letting them blow up themselves instead of downtown shopping areas, sort of thing.  At least one person usually dies, there's quite a bit of violence, and usually some pretty impressive-looking explosions.

My favorite character's is Bruce Campbell's-- a likable, flawed yet decent guy.  The main character is ok, but the actor has a little lisp he usually covers but it comes out  in the narration and quickly gets annoying.