The Turquoise Mask

The Turquoise Mask
by Phyllis A. Whitney
Rating: ★★★½
isbn: 9780385085144
Publication Date: January 1, 1974
Pages: 250
Genre: Fiction
Publisher: Doubleday

Wow, can Whitney be verbose. Her earlier work has always been better, in my opinion, but this one was an in-between – first published in 1974. Which makes the plotting excellent, and the abuse of the expository extreme. Unfortunately the expository gauntlet must be run for many chapters before a hint of the rewarding plot can be found.

I’m undecided on whether it’s worth the effort. The plotting was very well done. I was absolutely certain I knew who the villain was right up until almost the end, when she convinced me I was wrong, that it was really …. and then she blindsided me with the solution that was just unexpected. Whitney got huge bonus points for stunning me, but I’m not sure how I actually feel about it as a legitimate ending. It works, but it feels like it shouldn’t.

The characters, and the romance, were, as is typical with both Whitney’s writing and the time she wrote in, dramatic and overly simplified. Insta-love has nothing on romantic suspense from the 70’s; and characters’ personalities are never subtle or nuanced. If you accept this as the style of its time, it’s not an insurmountable problem.

The one thing Whitney never lost, no matter how many books she wrote, was her sense of place. I’m not sure I’ve ever read anybody better at putting the reader in whatever setting she wants them, and making them feel like they were there. Here the deserts of New Mexico are the backdrop, and though I’ve never in my life seen an adobe house, I feel like I’ve lived in one the last couple of days.

I’d neither recommend it nor deter anyone from this one; the exposition is a challenge, but if that slow build isn’t a deterrent, the story is one of her more complicated and compelling ones.

I read this for the Romantic Suspense square (which is on my card is the Psych square that’s been flipped), for Halloween Bingo 2020.

Half-off Ragnarok (InCryptid, #3)

Half-Off Ragnarok
by Seanan McGuire
Rating: ★★★½
isbn: 9780756408114
Series: InCryptid #3
Publication Date: March 1, 2014
Pages: 356
Genre: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy
Publisher: DAW Books

These books always start off so slow for me, and this one felt especially so. I suppose the author might have felt as though she needed to do a bit of world building with the change of character. Whatever the case, Alex’s story dragged in spite of some cryptid action early on in the first half.

Fortunately, I liked Alex, and I was interested enough in Sarah’s recovery after book 2 to keep on. Which became more important as I failed to find anything interesting or authentic about Shelby, Alex’s romantic interest. Partly because, living in Australia, I was looking for the “Aussie-ness” of her personality, and it never appeared. In the acknowledgements, the author thanked someone for keeping her from making Shelby a cliché, which I can wholly appreciate wanting to avoid, as well as how easily it might be to fall into that trap. But I think her advisor might have over-compensated (and failed to catch that it’s the Great Ocean Road, not highway). Most Aussies aren’t Crocodile Dundee, or Steve Irwin, but they do have a unique character, and Shelby didn’t have it. Though my favorite quote of the book was:

“Pretty sure that ship has sailed,” said Shelby, who was eyeing the nearby foliage with trepidation, as if she expected it to attack at any moment. Then again, she came from Australia: she probably did expect some sort of vegetable ambush.

(Australia. The only continent designed with a difficulty rating of “ha ha fuck you no.”)

After about the first half, the story started to stand on its own legs. Shelby never really got off the ground for me, but the rest of the story coalesced into something moderately interesting. The plot was well crafted, but it just didn’t have any oomph, for me. As always though, the presence of the Aeslin mice, and in this case, Angela Baker, made up for a lot.

I have the second of Alex’s books, and I’ll read it – it takes place in Australia, and it will be interesting to see of the author writes the characters any more authentically on the second try.

I’m using this book for the Monsters square in Halloween Bingo 2020. It not only had basilisks, gorgons, and cockatrice, oh my, but one of the main secondary characters, Alex’s grandfather, is a revenant.

Down the reading hole, or what I did my first week of holidays

Remember that re-read streak I went on? The one that had nothing to do with my Halloween Bingo progress? I’ve just now come out of Patricia Briggs’ world of the Marrok; I’ve run out of books to re-read. I’ve decided, though, that I’m going to make Patricia Briggs my Author wild card in Halloween Bingo; at this point, it would be stupid not to. That means at leat one square can be filled with a book: A Grimm Tale.

Rather than do a re-read review of the 4 books I’ve re-read, I’m just going to summarise by saying they’re all good and they all stand up nicely to my original ratings and reviews. If anyone is curious about reading those original reviews, the covers below link to them.

Fair Game (Alpha and Omega, #3)

Fair Game
by Patricia Briggs
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 0441020038
Series: Alpha and Omega #3
Publication Date: March 9, 2012
Pages: 293
Genre: Fiction, Urban Fantasy
Publisher: Ace

You know what’s really aggravating about deciding to re-read an old favorite series? Discovering that you don’t actually own a print copy of the first book. That’s been remedied – though I had to settle for a paperback, grumblegrumble, but I couldn’t wait. So I grabbed what I thought was the next book in the series, Fair Game. It isn’t, by the way, the next book. I skipped over one; it was late, I was tired and angry about Cry Wolf, and, oh, who cares, it’s a re-read.

Reading my original review, I didn’t care for this book as much as the others. Yet, when I think back on the series, this is the one I remember best. Re-reading it, I find that I rate it higher than I originally did; 4 stars instead of 3.5. It’s still all kinds of dark and deeply disturbed in plot, but I didn’t find Charles’ inevitable crises, and his reaction to it, quite as irritating as I did that first time. Likely because this time I knew it was a crises that wouldn’t last beyond the book itself.

I’m looking forward to re-read all the books in the series – after my copy of Cry Wolf arrives, that is. There’s a new one coming out next March, and I need to catch up before it arrives.

Alpha & Omega (re-read from Shifting Shadows anthology)

Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson
by Patricia Briggs
Rating: ★★★★★
isbn: 0425265005
Series: Alpha and Omega #0.5
Publication Date: September 9, 2014
Pages: 450
Genre: Fiction, Urban Fantasy
Publisher: Ace

The re-read rabbit hole I fell into this weekend included a need to re-visit Briggs’ Alpha and Omega series, and what better place to start than the beginning?

I’ve re-read this story many times, and it always holds up; it’s almost exactly the right length – another chapter’s worth of details would have been welcome, but the story didn’t suffer from the lack either. The plot is complete, the characters well-drawn.

I can’t imagine a day when I’ll stop enjoying this story.

The Sun Down Motel

The Sun Down Motel
by Simone St. James
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780440000174
Publication Date: February 18, 2020
Pages: 327
Genre: Mystery, Suspense
Publisher: Berkley

Something hasn’t been right at the roadside Sun Down Motel for a very long time, and Carly Kirk is about to find out why in this chilling new novel from the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of The Broken Girls.

Upstate New York, 1982. Viv Delaney wants to move to New York City, and to help pay for it she takes a job as the night clerk at the Sun Down Motel in Fell, New York. But something isnʼt right at the motel, something haunting and scary.

Upstate New York, 2017. Carly Kirk has never been able to let go of the story of her aunt Viv, who mysteriously disappeared from the Sun Down before she was born. She decides to move to Fell and visit the motel, where she quickly learns that nothing has changed since 1982. And she soon finds herself ensnared in the same mysteries that claimed her aunt.

I am not a fan of horror, but I’m a big fan of old-fashioned ghost stories, when read in broad daylight. I’ve been a big fan of Simone St. James’ ghost stories since I first found The Haunting of Maddy Claire, the first of … five?… historical ghost stories. She branched off in a new direction with The Broken Girls, going with a dual time-line plot, which I read hesitantly, but enjoyed thoroughly. The Sun Down Motel is another such book: a dual time-line mystery firmly rooted around a haunted place, this time a hotel that was pretty much doomed before it ever opened its doors.

I’m still a fan of St. James – I think this was a riveting read, and I devoured it in 2 sittings (daylight hours, all of them), but it wasn’t as good as some of her others for two reasons, both purely subjective. The first was the heavy handedness of the message: that women have always been, and sadly will always be, to some extent, vulnerable and expendable. This is as unavoidable a fact as it is an inexcusable one, but more subtle writing would have had more powerful an impact. Instead, there were times – just a few – that I felt like I was the choir and I was being preached at. This wasn’t a massive issue; it was just enough to pull me out of my head and the story a time or two.

The second reason is almost silly: the ghosts. They were almost exactly my right level of scary, but, and it took me some time to figure this out, they didn’t have quite the effect on me as the ghosts in her previous books, because they never really focused on the main characters. These hauntings were almost the remnant-kind: they were there acting in an endless loop, whether anyone witnessed or not, although there was a trigger. The main ghost communicated with the historical time-line mc, but only once without being pushed into it by Viv. The other ghosts communicated with the present day mc, Carly, but benignly. They were spooky, absolutely, but at a remove, so that they fell just short of spine-tingling.

And I guess, as I write this I was left unsatisfied by Nick’s story; it felt like it should be going somewhere and it didn’t. I’m also disappointed that there was never an explanation for the present-day entry in the guest book of one James March who registered the day Carly and Nick had their first real experience with the Sun Down Motel. That was a BIG little thing to leave hanging with no follow up.

But overall, it was a good story; I liked that both Viv and Carly had solid friendships in their timelines; I liked that Nick was her support from pretty much page 1, and I liked the investigatory process of the mystery plot, even if I thought Viv was a reckless idiot. The story sucked me in, and I remain a solid fan of St. James’ books.

Left to my own devices, I’d have read this book as soon as I got it back in August, but I held off because it was a perfect fit for Halloween Bingo’s Ghost Stories square.

Imaginary Numbers (InCryptid)

Imaginary Numbers
by Seanan McGuire
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 0756413788
Series: InCryptid #9
Publication Date: February 18, 2020
Pages: 431
Publisher: DAW Books

The InCryptid series is an outlier for me; it’s the only series I’ve ever read where I feel comfortable picking and choosing which books to read, and have no problem skipping those that don’t appeal to me. My favourites are the Verity novels, and in those novels one of the best characters in my opinion, was Sarah. So when this book came out, I was excited about seeing where the author would take this character when given her own space.

I went in with few expectations, but still, even though it was a good book I read in almost one sitting (I fell asleep with 10 pages to go), I was disappointed. It started off great but went pear shaped once Sarah was forced to work with the other cuckoos. Because at this point the story became more science fiction than urban fantasy, and I don’t like science fiction.

Still, I could have coped, but there were two biggies for me: 1. The all-or-nothing we have to save the world from annihilation trope drives me insane. Like nobody would notice this apocalyptic occurrence? It’s totally unreasonable and gets more unreasonable as the book comes to an end. 2. The end. It’s a damn cliffhanger. I hate cliffhangers. Especially when the cliffhanger is in a book that’s just been released and how long am I going to have to wait until the resolution? Will I care by that point?

In spite of all this complaining, you’ll notice I still gave the book 4 stars. Because McGuire can write. She made me devour a story that was irritating me more and more from the mid-way point because her characters are awesome, and the dialog, oh, the dialog is a joy to read. So much sass and wit that’s perfectly balanced and never over-played. Also, the Aeslin mice – they’re always good for at least a 1/2 star bump.

I had planned to use this book for a Spell Pack card in Halloween Bingo, I think. But after reading it I realise it fits perfectly for the In the Dark, Dark Woods square, as most of the story takes place on the Price compound in the middle of the Oregon woods and Sarah is very descriptive about the drive through those woods to get to the compound. Also, 2 significant events to the plot take place in those woods.

The Betel Nut Tree Mystery (Crown Colony, #2)

The Betel Nut Tree Mystery
by Ovidia Yu
Rating: ★★★½
Series: Crown Colony Mystery #2
Publication Date: June 12, 2018
Pages: 312
Publisher: Constable

What we came to think of as the betel nut affair began in the middle of a tropical thunderstorm in December 1937 . . .

Singapore is agog with the news of King Edward VIII's abdication to marry American heiress Wallis Simpson. Chen Su Lin, now Chief Inspector Le Froy's secretarial assistant in Singapore's newly formed detective unit, still dreams of becoming a journalist and hopes to cover the story when the Hon Victor Glossop announces he is marrying an American widow of his own, Mrs Nicole Covington, in the Colony. But things go horribly wrong when Victor Glossop is found dead, his body covered in bizarre symbols and soaked in betel nut juice.

The beautiful, highly-strung Nicole claims it's her fault he's dead . . . just like the others. And when investigations into her past reveal a dead lover, as well as a husband, the case against her appears to be stacking up. Begrudgingly on Le Froy's part, Su Lin agrees to chaperon Nicole at the Farquhar Hotel, intending to get the truth out of her somehow. But as she uncovers secrets and further deaths occur, Su Lin realises she may not be able to save Nicole's life - or even her own.

I’m not sure what to say about this book; it both is and isn’t the type of mystery I normally read. The plotting and setting is totally in my wheelhouse, but I don’t really connect with the characters, and it’s always easier to really get into books where you connect with the characters. The secondary characters are, for me, the most lively and fleshed out of the lot, and I enjoyed their short time on the pages.

The setting of pre-WWII Singapore is a rich setting about which I know nothing, so I find that part of the reading compellingly interesting. Yu does a spectacular job bringing the monsoon season to life, as well as the city itself.

There are two reveals in the plot of The Betel Nut Tree Mystery, and unfortunately, both were transparent. I knew the identity of the columnist after the first few chapters, and I guessed who the murderer was soon thereafter. This unfortunate transparency wasn’t enough to stop me reading the book, obviously, but it did ding my rating.

In spite of this post making it sound like I only found the book to be ‘meh’, I’m looking forward to reading the next book; even if the mysteries themselves aren’t perfect, their setting and time are, and I want to see what happens next.

I read this book off my TBR as part of Halloween Bingo 2020, for the International Women of Mystery square.

Final Exam (Murder 101 Mystery, #4)

Final Exam
by Maggie Barbieri
Rating: ★★★½
isbn: 0312376774
Series: Murder 101 #4
Publication Date: December 8, 2009
Pages: 336
Genre: Mystery
Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur

Well, this book was better than the last one, Quick Study, but it wasn’t as good as the first two books. Allison, our now-fearless MC, is back to being thrust into situations beyond her control, albeit with some serious authorial license – in the first book Allison was tenured. Now, she’s not, which I guess gives the administration the power needed to force her into being a Resident Admin at one of the dorms when the current RA goes missing. Allison is determined to find out where the missing RA is, so she can move back home and off the dry, catholic campus.

When Allison moves into her room, her toilet explodes, revealing a brick of pure heroin. This only spurs her on, of course.

What results is a bit convoluted, and the story is further muddied by a side plot involving her best friend’s marriage which didn’t quite work. Ultimately, the plot, distilled down to its essence, is a good one involving unwitting college students, drug runs and what a less-than-ethical parent will do in the name of ‘what’s best’ for their child. No dead bodies in this one, just a lot of chases and head wounds. But in my opinion, it could have been better with, perhaps, a different editor. This author writes good crime mysteries, and efforts at high-jinks just fall flat.

Smoke Bitten (Mercy Thompson, #12)

Smoke Bitten
by Patricia Briggs
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Mercy Thompson #12
Publication Date: March 19, 2020
Pages: 344
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Publisher: Orbit Books

Mercy Thompson returns in another thrilling instalment from No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Patricia Briggs

I am Mercedes Athena Thompson Hauptman. My only 'superpowers' are that I turn into a thirty-five-pound coyote and fix Volkswagens. But I have friends in odd places and a pack of werewolves at my back. It looks like I'm going to need them.
Centuries ago, the fae dwelt in Underhill. When they were cast out, they left behind their great castles, troves of magical artefacts . . . and their prisoners. Without the fae to mind them, those creatures roamed freely through Underhill wreaking havoc. Only the deadliest survived.
Now one of those prisoners has escaped. It can look like any creature it chooses and if it bites you, it controls you. It lives for chaos and destruction and can make you do anything - even kill the person you love the most. Now it is here, in the Tri-Cities. In my territory.
It won't, can't, remain. Not if I have anything to say about it.

Finally! A Mercy Thompson book that didn’t include storylines with animal sacrifice. The last few books before this had me seriously hesitant to continue with the series, and even after buying this, it stared at me for about a week before I picked it up with the intention of putting it right back down again if it even looked at an animal the wrong way.

Fortunately – and unfortunately – I never had to put the book down. At least, not until 2.30am when I finally gave into sleep, only to pick it up again the next morning and finish it off.

That’s not to say the story was perfect; it was good, but the sub-plot between Mercy and Adam was meh, and got terribly schmaltzy towards the end (keeping in mind I have a low tolerance for “the power of love”).

The main plot concerned something that got out of Underhill and started possessing people, making them kill others, before it killed them and moved on. This was more interesting to me, although it never really achieved ‘gripping’. And towards the end, but long before the climax, I guessed who the smoke demon was, which was both a tiny bit disappointing, and also – YAY! I was right! – making it a wash overall.

Generally, I enjoyed the story and it restored my faith in the series. I hope book 13 stays away from the witches, although with that number, I don’t like my chances.