Reviews and Comments

Phil in SF

kingrat@sfba.club

Joined 1 year, 4 months ago

aka @kingrat@sfba.social. I'm following a lot of bookwyrm accounts, since that seems to be the only way to get reviews from larger servers to this small server. Also, I will like & boost a lot of reviews that come across my feed. I will follow most bookwyrm accounts back if they review & comment. Social reading should be social.

2024 In The Books

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Paulette Jiles: Chenneville (AudiobookFormat, 2023, HarperAudio) 5 stars

Consumed with grief, driven by vengeance, a man undertakes an unrelenting odyssey across the lawless …

Excellent Western

5 stars

John Chenneville wakes up in a Union Army field hospital after being unconscious for months due to a serious head wound. He returns home only to find out his sister has been murdered while he was a soldier. The murderer appears to be a local deputy, so the sheriff doesn't seem inclined to do anything about it. John swears revenge, and thus begins a multi-state chase via foot, horseback, and boat. Along the way John meets a young female telegrapher but he is resolute on revenge instead of love.

The story is made by lots and lots of details about life on the post Civil War road that illustrate both his personality and what life was (presumably) like for an unattached veteran at the time. Additionally, the narration by Grover Gardner has just the right amount of gravelly old gentleman in it for the story.

Mark Mills: Preparations (EBook, 2010, Tor.com) 2 stars

Ronald T. Turner is prepared for anything. And the zombies are prepared for him.

Zombies get him anyway

2 stars

Content warning Spoils a punch-line that's not good enough to really worry about spoiling but nevertheless here we are

reviewed The Treatment by Mo Hayder (Jack Caffery, #2)

Mo Hayder: The Treatment (EBook, 2012, Grove Press) 4 stars

In a quiet residential area in London, a couple is discovered bound and imprisoned in …

Excellent, but very very intense

4 stars

Jack Caffery, brilliant detective whose past includes his brother disappearing and likely killed by a pedophile next door, is put on a case where a child is missing and increasingly likely to be dead after a pedophile ties a family up and does unspeakable things to the family. In fact, there may even be overlap between the current case and the long ago case of his brother.

The story is intense and fucked up. The families of the child victims are somewhat unlikable, and Hayder writes too many characters to make the reader think they may also be pedophiles. So while it's a well-written police procedural, I am not going to keep reading the series. Child abuse is just too infused into every aspect of the story and I'd rather read something not so depraved.

Adrian Tchaikovsky: Elder Race (EBook, 2021, Tordotcom) 4 stars

In Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race, a junior anthropologist on a distant planet must help the …

Lonely wizard in the tower impresses non-magical local woman

4 stars

Here's the premise: Humans explore space, establishing settlements across the galaxy. Something happens, and all the settlements are on their own for hundreds of years. Many devolve to pre-industrial states without connection to other settlements. A revived Earth sends out research missions to all the settlements with a Prime Directive like instruction to observe but not interfere. But then something happens again and all the research missions lose contact with Earth, stranding researchers, who have access to life-extending health technology as well as other machines not available to local settlements.

Nyr is the stranded anthropologist. Lynesse, aka Lyn, is local settlement royalty, but is the 4th, and least important daughter. A corruption starts defeating outlying kingdoms. Royalty doesn't care much because they are outlying. Lynesse sees a bigger danger, and sets off to find the wizard of legend (Nyr) to convince him to help. Isolated and lonely, he agrees.

The …

reviewed "C" is for Corpse by Sue Grafton (Kinsey Millhone, #3)

Sue Grafton: "C" is for Corpse (AudiobookFormat, 2005, Books on Tape) 3 stars

After a near-fatal car accident, a young man asks Kinsey to protect him. When he …

Meh, it was ok.

3 stars

Shortly before I hit the road with 14 hours in the air (each way) to Lisbon, it occurred to me I would need more than one audiobook to cover the flights. By shortly, I mean about 5 minutes before I left for the airport. I vaguely remembered the Alphabet series. I wasn't expecting anything super great, but the story barely met that bar. I should have pulled something that I'd already put on my TBR.

Kinsey Millhone is a private investigator in Santa Teresa, California, modeled after Santa Barbara. Bobby Callahan hires her to investigate who tried to kill him months before in what appeared to be a car accident. Hitch is, Callahan has lost most of his memory in the crash. The crime is overly complicated, which is a thing that irritates me when it happens in crime fiction. But what really made me meh about this is that …

Mary Robinette Kowal: The Martian Contingency (AudiobookFormat, 2025, Audible Studios) 5 stars

Years after a meteorite strike obliterated Washington, DC—triggering an extinction-level global-warming event—Earth’s survivors have started …

Elma York finally makes it to Mars

5 stars

The concluding book of the Lady Astronaut series starts off with Elma York finally getting to land on Mars. The 2nd Mars Expedition's mission is to establish a base on Mars for later Earth escapees. Only… of course stuff goes wrong, because space is hard. Prior to landing humans, Earth send a series of unstaffed rockets to Mars that dropped supplies. Only when Elma arrives at the drop site to pick up the supplies, which includes the atmosphere scrubber for the second dome, they find it has crash-landed and everything is a loss. The Martians can replace it by cannibalizing one of the engines of their ship, if everything works out all right. There's politics. Intrigue. Gee whiz exploration of Mars. Relationships & emotion. 60s & 70s style colonization tropes with 2020s sensibility & quality of writing. And if you get the audiobook, Kowal narrates the story herself and she …

reviewed Cop Hater by Ed McBain (87th Precinct, #1)

Ed McBain: Cop Hater (Hardcover, 1990, Armchair Detective Library) 3 stars

Cop Hater (1956) is the first 87th Precinct police procedural novel by Ed McBain. The …

The pulpiest of police procedurals

3 stars

Three detectives are killed in quick succession in Isola, a fictionalized version of New York City. Fictionalized, according to the author, so he could take liberties with how the cops in New York City actually operate. Full of dames and men who appreciate the swell of a woman's chest and gangs that rumble, cops that harass suspects based on hunches, having a drink or two on the job and a general lack of respect for the Bill of Rights that predated the Warren court. The crime is solved through luck, accumulating evidence (I like this part) and a not very smart impatient criminal. There's a lot of copaganda in it, but the police are not portrayed as being particularly smart.