Book Review: Curated True Crime #12: Deadly Stalkers
13 hours ago
Chinese-born Cece was adopted when she was two years old by her American parents. Living in Texas, she’s bored of her ho-hum high school and dull job. So when she learns about the S.A.S.S. program to Xi’an, China, she jumps at the chance. She’ll be able to learn about her passion — anthropology — and it will give her the opportunity to explore her roots. But when she arrives, she receives quite a culture shock. And the closer she comes to finding out about her birth parents, the more apprehensive she gets. Enter Will, the cute guy she first meets on the plane. He and Cece really connect during the program. But can he help her get accustomed to a culture she should already know about, or will she leave China without the answers she’s been looking for?
Marla Mason Series: #1 Blood Engines | #2 Poison Sleep #3 Dead Reign | #4 Spell Games | Mercy Thompson Series: #1 Moon Called | #2 Blood Bound #3 Iron Kissed | #4 Bone Crossed |
misc. favourites: Hunting Ground by Patricia Briggs | Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson The Magician's Daughter by S.C. Butler | The Shaktra by Christopher Pike Fires of Heaven by Robert Jordan (ebook) | Spellbent by Lucy Snyder |
Alexia Tarabotti is laboring under a great many social tribulations. First, she has no soul. Second, she's a spinster whose father is both Italian and dead. Third, she was rudely attacked by a vampire, breaking all standards of social etiquette.
Where to go from there? From bad to worse apparently, for Alexia accidentally kills the vampire -- and then the appalling Lord Maccon (loud, messy, gorgeous, and werewolf) is sent by Queen Victoria to investigate.
With unexpected vampires appearing and expected vampires disappearing, everyone seems to believe Alexia responsible. Can she figure out what is actually happening to London's high society? Will her soulless ability to negate supernatural powers prove useful or just plain embarrassing? Finally, who is the real enemy, and do they have treacle tart?
Miss Alexia Tarabotti was not enjoying her evening. Private balls were never more than middling amusements for spinsters, and Miss Tarabotti was not the kind of spinster who could garner even that much pleasure from the event. To put the pudding in the puff: she had retreated to the library, her favorite sanctuary in any house, only to happen upon an unexpected vampire.
She glared at the vampire.
Fourteen-year-old Nick would be lying dead in a Brooklyn park — murdered by drug dealers — had Peter not sprung out of the trees to save him. Now the irresistibly charismatic wild boy wants Nick to follow him into a strange and unsettling mist swirling around the bay. Even though he is wary of Peter's crazy talk of faeries and monsters, Nick agrees. After all, nowhere in New York City is safe for him now. And what more can he possibly lose?
There is always more to lose.
Accompanying Peter to a gray and ravished island that was once a lush, enchanted paradise, Nick finds himself unwittingly recruited for a war that has raged for centuries. He must learn to fight or die as he struggles to fit in with the "Devils" — Peter's savage tribe of lost and stolen children.
Here, Peter's dark past is revealed: left to wolves as an infant, despised, tormented, and hunted, Peter moves between the worlds of faerie and man, struggling to understand what he is and where he belongs. The Child Thief is a leader of bloodthirsty children, a brave friend, and a creature driven to do whatever he must to kill the dreaded Captain and stop his murderous crew of "Flesh-eaters" before they blight every trace of magic left in this dying land.
Cassel comes from a family of curse workers -- people who have the power to change your emotions, your memories, your luck, by the slightest touch of their hands. And since curse work is illegal, they're all mobsters, or con artists. Except for Cassel. He hasn't got the magic touch, so he's an outsider, the straight kid in a crooked family. You just have to ignore one small detail -- he killed his best friend, Lila, three years ago.
Ever since, Cassel has carefully built up a façade of normalcy, blending into the crowd. But his façade starts crumbling when he starts sleepwalking, propelled into the night by terrifying dreams about a white cat that wants to tell him something. He's noticing other disturbing things, too, including the strange behavior of his two brothers. They are keeping secrets from him, caught up in a mysterious plot. As Cassel begins to suspect he's part of a huge con game, he also wonders what really happened to Lila. Could she still be alive? To find that out, Cassel will have to out-con the conmen.
“By the time he'd finished reading the notebook, Jack's cigarette was little more than a tube of ash. He stubbed the remains out on his boot-heel.
<<Is it him?>> he asked.
Tzu-lu was so surprised at hearing a white man speak Chinese that he very nearly missed what came next.
from chapter 1 of Year of the Horse by Justin Allen
“For the Love of Pete, Don’t Mix Your Genres;
Or...The New York Times Book Review Hates YOU, but I Don’t;
Or...Why Where Your Book Gets Shelved Determines Your Intelligence, Work-Ethic and Value to Society
That’s a longish title I’ll admit, and while I generally don’t go in for such larded vessels, in this case I’m willing to make an exception. Monstrous though it may seem (and most assuredly is), the above title sums up pretty much everything I have to say on the subjects of writing and publishing. The first line ought to be read as a word of warning to struggling writers. The second explains - in as much as an explanation of the unintelligible is even possible - why the publishing industry behaves as it does. And the third highlights our common enemy, which turns out to be ourselves.
Really - if I must say so myself - that title is a wonder of economy, precision and restraint. But maybe you’d like me to elaborate? Normally I’d refuse - principally on the grounds that my arguments tend to be weakened by exploration - but as I have been contracted to provide a minimum of fifteen minutes of reading diversion, I will betray myself and attempt to explain...
Why Where Your Book Gets Shelved Determines Your Intelligence, Work-Ethic and Value to Society.
One night, in cities all across Europe, five children vanish - only to appear, years later, at an exclusive New York party with a strange and
elegant governess. Rumor and mystery follow the Faust teenagers to the city's most prestigious high school, where they soar to suspicious heights with the help of their benefactor's extraordinary "gifts."
But as the students claw their way up - reading minds, erasing scenes, stopping time, stealing power, seducing with artificial beauty - the side-effects of their own addictions. And as they make further deals with the devil, they uncover secrets more shocking than their most unforgivable sins.
Five Years Previously
London
Victoria didn’t have time to play. She didn’t have time for friends or laughing or jumping or any other thing little kids do. Victoria was ten, but she didn’t like ten-year-olds. At all the London dinner parties, her job was to shut up and look well-behaved for the adults. She would sit in a big plush armchair, her feet barely touching the floor, and she would pick the petals off a bouquet of blue hydrangeas in a nearby vase. She would quietly brood as she watched the adults circle the room, drink tea or cocktails, and comment on the sculptures in the foyer.
Nicodemus is a young, gifted wizard with a problem. Magic in his world requires the caster to create spells by writing out the text...but he has always been dyslexic, and thus has trouble casting even the simplest of spells. And his misspells could prove dangerous, even deadly, should he make a mistake in an important incantation.
Yet he has always felt that he is destined to be something more than a failed wizard. When a powerful, ancient evil begins a campaign of murder and disruption, Nicodemus starts to have disturbing dreams that lead him to believe that his misspelling could be the result of a curse. But before he can discover the truth about himself, he is attacked by an evil which has already claimed the lives of fellow wizards and has cast suspicion on his mentor. He must flee for his own life if he’s to find the true villain.
But more is at stake than his abilities. For the evil that has awakened is a power so dread and vast that if unleashed it will destroy Nicodemus...and the world.
Adventurer.
The name never uttered without scorn, they are long loathed for their knowledge of nothing beyond violence and greed and their utter disregard for human life, least of all their own.
And Lenk, a young man with a sword in his hand and a voice in his head, counts them as his closest company.
Charged with retrieving the Tome of the Undergates, a written key to a world long forgotten by mankind and home to creatures determined to return, Lenk is sent after ancient evangelical demons, psychotic warrior women and abominations lost to myth. Against them, he has but two weapons: a piece of steel and five companions as eager to kill each other as they are to help him.
“"Ivy, my dear," said Miss Tarabotti as her friend bustled up, "how marvelous of you to find time to walk at such short notice! What a hideous bonnet. I do hope you did not pay too much for it."
"Alexia! How perfectly horrid of you to criticize my hat. Why would I not be able to walk this morning? You know I never have anything better to do on Thursdays. Thursdays are so tiresome, don't you find?" replied Miss Hisselpenny.
from chapter 2 of Soulless by Gail Carriger