The Readin Roos

Jake Marlowe discovers that he is the last werewolf on the planet, and sets out to put his affairs in order before WOCOP, the secretive organization that makes it their mission to kill supernatural entitites, hunts him down. As he does so, we ends up getting tangled up with vampires (yep, they exist too) as well as a young woman who holds the key to the survival of his species.

Reviewed by Buddy Pennington

I have a lot of catching up to do on this blog, and I do mean a lot. I've been off for a few months doing a number of things, and now I'm back in school working on my Master's, so I have lost tough with the phrase "spare time." Anyway, in the months before starting school, I read a load of books. Here are a few.

I tend to read a lot of chick fic as well as vampire lore, so naturally I was drawn to the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris. Holy cow, what a great bunch of fun! I've read the first ... lemme count ... carry the two ...

Peter Grant is back on the case when a body turns up at the morgue and the coroner can hear the song "Body and Soul" when he gets close to it. This one was almost as good as Midnight Riot, but it does have a trope (which I can't describe without giving away the ending) that gets on my nerves a bit. Why don't fictional characters ever take my sage advice when I tell them not to do something?

The characters are still great, but there's something about their dynamic that is slighly less satisfying than it was in the first novel.

I had a really good time reading this book! It starts with a Probationary Constable in London watching over a crime scene in the wee hours, but his shift and his life get a lot more interesting when a ghost comes up to him and claims to have seen the murder happen. It turns out that there's a lot more out there than just ghosts and Peter Grant is going to be one of the few investigating the spooky side.

Although there is a riot at midnight in this book, it doesn't occur for quite a while, so the American title is kind of confusing for most of the book.

Meh.

This series used to be entertaining, but it has lost me. I think it was the fairy wars that did it. They just weren't that compelling to me, but they've become an important plot element. The author also has a bad habit of introducing new & interesting characters and then just killing them off by the end of the novel. Harris may as well just dress any new character in a red shirt.

You may have figured out by now I'm a sucker for supernatural mysteries. I love them dearly and while they by no means comprise my entire reading list, they make for a great majority of it.

This is the first book in what is so far a trilogy, but I suspect there will be more.

Former teacher Sadie Novak has left the classroom in favor of the world of gory crime scenes.

The stories in this book are all beautifully written, but some of them are likely to leave readers scratching their heads. That is, undoubtedly, the point. This book is not something to zip through in an evening (and I don't mean to denigrate those quick reads, I like them too), but something to dwell on and contemplate.

Some of the stories are fairly uplifting, but many of them are quite dark. I thought it was a good balance of the light and the dark.

This was a fascinating book and I loved every page!

Imagine an amusement park as a prison for demons. Now imagine what might happen when that park gets a facelift from someone who doesn't KNOW it's a demonic prison. The roller coaster starts here.

Odd coincidences are proven not to be, strangers aren't, and those who run the park are really jailers. Sound weird? It is - wonderfully so! I haven't read anything with such a unique premise in a long time, and I enjoyed every minute. It's not predictable in pretty much any fashion.