Can't Wait Wednesday #11

This week I found out that graphic novelist Nick Drnaso's newest novel Acting Class will be published on August 16, 2022. I am anxiously awaiting its publication. Drnaso is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where I studied and within a year of graduating he had huge success with the publication of his graphic novel Beverly. He followed up in 2018 with Sabrina. 

Acting Class follows ten strangers who meet at a free acting class in a community center. The teacher, John Smith, is a mysterious and morally questionable figure. This group of social misfits and restless searchers have one thing in common: they are out of step with their surroundings and desperate for change.  The group includes a husband and wife, four years into their marriage and simmering in boredom, a single mother, her young son showing disturbing signs of mental instability, a peculiar woman with few if any friends and only her menial job keeping her grounded, a figure model, comfortable in his body and ready for a creative challenge, a worried grandmother and her adult granddaughter, a hulking laborer and gym nut, a physical therapist and an ex-con. The class sinks deeper into their lessons as the process demands increasing devotion. When the line between real life and imagination begins to blur, the group’s deepest fears and desires are laid bare. 

The wide variety of characters alone gives the author many interesting ways to approach the plot. I look forward to finding out where he takes the story.

In A Kingdom By The Sea

This historical novel is a slow moving story concerning an English wife and mother named Gabriella/Gabby.  Her 2 kids are in college and her husband Mike has worked in foreign countries their entire married life. Near their 25th anniversary, Mike asks Gabby to join him in Karachi, Pakistan where he will begin a job in the airline industry. As a book translator Gabby can work anywhere in the world and email her work to her employer. She decides to go to Karachi. I thought this was a wrong decision but I guess Gabby was trying to connect with Mike who she has only seen on summer holidays. 

When Gabby arrives in Karachi she is both shocked and amazed at the noise of the city and the cultural divide between the sexes. However, she needed a new experience in her life and Gabby quickly accepted the country as is. Her openness to the culture gains her several new female friends. Gabby finds that that she is closer to these women emotionally than she was to her friends in England. 

The story alternates between the present day Pakistan and the 1970s Cornwall where Gabby grew up with sister Dominique. Dominque holds a family secret that is revealed midway into the story. This reveal has no bearing on the main plot and the alternating plot was unnecessary. The book is about Gabby growing as a person and this childhood story has no effect on the present day story. Dominique was a fantastic character and could have been used in the plot differently. 

There isn't much action. The book is about Gabby's growth as a person. I found this appealing though. 3 out of 5 stars.

Cold Iron #1

Cold Iron is a 5 part comic by Andy Diggle. While the copyright is from 2020, Issue 1 was just released as a Comixology Original in May. Next week Issue 2 will be released. Cold Iron is a supernatural thriller that takes place on the Isle of Man. Steeped in Celtic myth, Viking history and Faerie folklore, the island is nestled in the Irish Sea midway between England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. However, to aspiring singer-songwriter Kay Farragher, it feels a million miles from anywhere. She dreams of escaping the humdrum life of a sleepy backwater, and gives no credence to her grandmother’s old folktales and odd superstitions. But when she saves Mona, a traumatized girl lost in the night of Hop-tu-Naa, Kay quickly realizes this is no mere Halloween prank gone wrong. In the mossy glens and rainswept valleys of the island, the shadows of a forgotten past are gathering once more. There is another world, an older world, close by our own but out of reach. On this night the walls grow thin, and someone, or something,  has clawed its way through and it is here to hunt.

The story has a lovely British flavor with slang terms and a British accent here and there in the dialogue. The setting is dominate in this installment of the series.  We see neolithic burial sites, Celtic stone circles and Viking castles. The use of Celtic folklore creates a specific mood for the island and sets up the plot. All of the characters were introduced and they are fully developed in the comic's short 27 pages.  The author did a great job of setting up the story that will follow. 

5 out of 5 stars.

Stacking the Shelves #16

This week on Stacking the Shelves I want to highlight a chunky book that I bought last week at Barnes and Noble. Vaishnavi Patel's Keikeyi is a novel that shines a light on the vilified queen of the Ramayana. The author expands on her story with this fiction novel. Kaikeyi is the only daughter of the kingdom of Kekaya and she was raised on the tales of the gods: how they churned the vast ocean to obtain immortality, how they vanquish evil and ensure the land of Bharat prospers, and how they offer powerful boons to the worthy.  Kaikeyi is devastated when her father banishes her mother and then as he values her only for her marital prospects to the family. She begins to elicit the help of the gods  in order to bring back her mother, but it does not work. Kaikeyi turns to the scrolls that she once read with her mother and discovers that she has a magic she can harness from the gods. With this power, she begins to transform herself into a warrior, diplomat and a queen.  

I love the feel of holding big books. It is so much better than reading online and enhances my reading experience. Kaikeyi is 478 pages long, too short in my opinion. After reading Edward Rutherford's 1,100 page historical fiction novels of major cities of the world, Kaikeyi is definitely a short book. When I first picked up the book from the store shelves, I thought that it was a story about an African queen.  However, closer inspection of the book cover revealed that the queen on the cover was wearing tradition Indian wedding garb. I feel stupid that I thought Kaikeyi was from Africa just because her face is in silhouette on the cover. 

I have already begun reading the book but am only on page 59. The story has captivated me and I look forward to finish reading it.

Red Tag

I have read Issues 1 through 3 of Rafael Scavone's Red Tag comic. He co-wrote the comic with Rafael Albuquerque and Roger Cruz. Issue 4 will be  released tomorrow and issue 5, the final issue for Season One, will be released next month. It was a captivating story about three friends searching for justice on the streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Lis, Lu and Leco are street artists and they bonded over their love for Brazil's unique street art called "pixo" which is a Sao Paulo fixture. After discovering that dangerous people, holdovers from Brazil's brutal dictatorial past, are plotting against the reform movement in Sao Paulo, the three of them gain the attention of these people and their lives become endangered. Afraid that one of the reformer's life is in danger, overnight they spray paint warnings to him in pixo on Sao Paulo's buildings. 

This is a fast paced thriller with appealing characters.  I especially loved the villain - Noronha.  He is a military policeman who works undercover and earns money by extortion. The drawings of his facial expressions were amusing. The plot itself could take place anywhere on the planet, not just in Brazil. Youths from many countries are protesting against corruption wherever they see it. In this respect, the story is timely.

I loved this comic and plan on reading the 2 future installments of the series.  5 out of 5 stars.

Among the Innocent

I received an advanced review copy (ARC) of this book from the Early Reviewer's Club at Librarything in exchange for an honest review. It is an Amish story but with a different twist. This suspense thriller features Leah Miller, a former Amish woman, as a police officer who is investigating a murder. 

Leah's own Amish family was murdered in their barn ten years prior. She was taken in by the local sheriff and his wife who raised her as an Englisher. Leah became a police officer because she loved her adopted father. She works in her home town, St. Ignatius, Montana, where a murder has just occurred that had similarities to the murder of her family. With a piece of paper written by the killer stating that he will be coming for Leah, it is apparent that the killer will continue to kill until he can catch Leah. As Leah and the new police chief, Dalton Cooper, work long hours struggling to fit the pieces together, they can't help but grow closer. When secrets from both of their pasts begin to surface, an unexpected connection between them is revealed. But this is only the beginning. Could it be that the former police chief framed an innocent man to keep the biggest secret of all buried? And what will it mean for Leah--and Dalton--when the full truth comes to light?

I LOVED this book! The fast pacing is what makes this book so intense. The story began with an edge of your seat prologue that would not let me put the book down until I finished reading it. There is alot of action with plenty of twists that keep your heart pounding. The two main characters, Leah and Dalton, were both tough and vulnerable at the same time and they could have been the stars of the novel. However, the gripping plot carries this whodunnit to a 5 star rating. It's been awhile since I read a suspense thriller with such an intricate plot and intensity and it was very satisfying.

5 out of 5 stars.

Stacking the Shelves #15

Stacking the Shelves is a weekly post about sharing the books that you are adding to your bookshelf. The books can be either physical or or ebooks, books from the library or books that you purchased. Stacking the Shelves was originally hosted at the Team Tynga's Reviews blog but the blog shut down in 2021, the Reading Reality blog took over.

I am looking forward to Daniel Silva's newest novel Portrait of an Unknown Woman. It will be published on July 19, 2022 and I have pre-ordered the book. Silva writes the Gabriel Allon spy series and Portrait is the 24th installment of the series. In the novel we see that the legendary spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon has severed his ties with the Israeli intelligence service and settled in Venice. When longtime friend and London art dealer Julian Usherwood asks Gabriel to investigate the rediscovery and sale of a centuries old painting, Gabriel agrees to help out. After finding out that the painting is a fake, Gabriel conceives one of the most elaborate schemes in his career to find the person who painted the fake.

The Panic #1: Coffin

Issue #1 of The Panic was recently published. It's a 5 part comic that is one of Comixology's Originals. Release #2 comes out next week and in early November a paperback version containing all 5 issues will be published.

The Panic opens with Annie Delgado on a train for her commute into New York City. The train suddenly derails and Annie's best friend dies. The train car that she is trapped on is beneath the Hudson River and neither she nor her ten other fellow commuters can get  their cell phones to work. The group decides to help each other in order to survive the night. They begin to make plans on how to climb out of the train to safety but they each have cultural, racial and political biases that get in the way of communicating. They soon realize that one of their fellow commuters was not on the train before the crash and all are suspicious of him. 

The comic is advertised as a horror story but I felt is was more a suspense thriller.  I did not see any horror aspects in issue 1. Perhaps it is coming. The artwork was interesting. Most of the pages are colored in blue and the varying funky hairstyles of the characters helps the reader figure out who is who. The publisher stated in their summary that the theme of the comic is loss of security and control of your surroundings. I did not analyze the story as such but enjoyed it immensely.

5 out  of 5 stars. 

Father's Day Murder

I expected to be returning back to Tinker's Cove, Maine for the fourth time this year for my June selection in the Calendar of Crime Reading Challenge. However, this installment of the Lucy Stone series takes place in Boston. Here we have Lucy traveling to Boston for a newspaper conference the week before Father's Day. As would be expected in a cozy mystery, someone at the conference is murdered. This time it was the newspaperman of the year Luther Read. The suspected cause of death was a new one for the series, an asthma attack. Since I have asthma myself, I knew exactly where the story was going. Other new aspects to the plot were that Lucy did not have any conflicts with law enforcement officers investigating the murder and none of her family members or friends were suspects. It's always good to see a series author keep the writing fresh with changes in the writing formula but it can easily go bad. This was not the case with the Father's Day Murder. My only issue with the book was that Lucy's family life took up too many pages in the novel. They were not pertinent to the plot so why were they there? In the other cozy mysteries that I follow, character development is worked into the plot action. While many of Meier's readers prefer to read about Lucy's family, I am not one of them. 

3 out of 5 stars.

Kingdom of Bones

Kingdom of Bones is the 16th Sigma Force thriller from James Rollins. The story began with a United Nations relief team in a small Congo village making an alarming discovery. An unknown virus is leveling the evolutionary playing field. Men, women, and children have been reduced to a dull, catatonic state while plants and animals have grown more cunning and predatory, evolving at an exponential pace. This phenomena is spreading from a cursed site in the jungle, known to locals as the Kingdom of Bones, and sweeping across Africa, threatening the rest of the world. What made the biosphere run amok; a natural event or did someone engineer it? Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma Force have kept the world safe for years. However, even these highly trained scientists do not understand what is unfolding in Africa or know how to stop it. In order to head off a global catastrophe, the Sigma Force crew must once again risk their lives to uncover the shattering secret at the heart of the African continent.

I usually love a James Rollins novel. I liked this one but I cannot say I loved it. It was highly technical concerning the biology of viruses which was way over my ability to understand. Also, the plot premise was a little too fantastical. Just because something could be possible doesn't mean that it's probable. The virus that the Sigma Force crew was investigating would mutate in the offspring of infected creatures. The DNA of the new creatures was sufficiently altered to make them more dangerous to humans but also too different from the species that they originated from. One other issue I had was why a military dog was taken along for this jungle adventure. Is it likely that a combat veteran would bring his dog on a hunt for a virus? The book just didn't seem like the traditional Sigma Force story.

3 out of 5 stars.

Can't Wait Wednesday #10

It's been awhile since I participated in this meme. It is hosted by the Wishful Endings blog and was begun to spotlight the books that we are excited about but have yet to read.  For me, that book is Among the Innocent by Mary Alford.  I received an advanced review (ARC) copy of it about a month ago but have not started it yet. It is a crime thriller that takes place in an Amish community in Montana.

The story is about a murder investigation conducted by Leah Miller. Her Amish family was murdered in their barn ten years prior. She was taken in by the local sheriff and his wife who raised her as an Englisher.  Leah became a police officer because she loved her adopted father. She works in her home town, St. Ignatius, Montana, where a murder occurred that had similarities to the murder of her family. While the setting is an Amish community the story is not the traditional Amish fiction novel. Instead, it is a murder mystery and I cannot wait to finally begin reading this ARC.

Fear Thy Neighbor

Fear Thy Neighbor is Fern Michaels' newest mystery and it is a fantastic read. It's hard to believe that she has written 150 novels to date. She is 89 years old and while I can't do the math, that's alot of books per year to write. She evidently has the it factor.

The story opens with a teenage Alison Marshall fighting off a man from her foster family. The scene quickly moves 11 years into the future with Alison visiting Palmetto Island for a few days while she travels south to Key West. After renting a room in a cheap hotel, the Courtesy Court, she runs across John Wilson, the owner of the local bait shop, who has been following her in her car. Later in the day, their paths cross again at Mel's Diner where John tries to sit at her table. Alison quickly eats and returns to her hotel. The owner, Betty, seems to he a nice but lonely old lady. Betty invites Alison into her unit for tea and Alison happily agrees, believing Betty to be a friendly person. When she wakes up the next day feeling groggy Alison wonders whether she was drugged. Her car keys are gone as is her gun and the kitties she rescued the day before. Planning to quickly leave the island,  Alison decides to have a fast breakfast before leaving. She can't stop thinking, though, about the island's charm and beautiful beach. Seeing an ad in the local paper for a realtor, Alison calls to see what properties are available on the island. She is shown a dilapidated beach house that she cannot resist buying. At 29, she is ready to put down roots.

Alison was a great character. Her paranoia about people, while understandable given her childhood, added to the suspense. She did not trust anyone and she overanalyzed every encounter with the human race. I would too if I came across the secondary characters in the novel. All the men were abusive and tried to get her into bed. Betty was not such a nice old lady as she presented herself to be but rather a wolf in sheep's clothing. Alison eventually met some decent new friends but she had trouble accepting them because her arrival on Palmetto Island was fraught with danger. I though it odd that she wanted to buy a house there given what happened to her when she initially arrived. Her decision to buy the house was overanalyzed as well but since Alison was cautious about everything in life it did not seem realistic. 

All in all, a fun read.  4 out of 5 stars.

The Fugitive Colours

Nancy Bilyeau's The Fugitive Colours is the sequel to her 2018 novel The Blue. If you read The Blue you know that the main character is Genevieve Planche. After fleeing England for France, she met and married Thomas Sturbridge. Six years later they are back in Spitalfields for this installment of the series. It is 1764 and since men control the arts, sciences, politics and law, Genevieve is struggling to keep her silk design business afloat. Both Thomas and Genevieve are Huguenots, Protestants from Catholic France, which further makes them suspicious in the eyes of their associates in England. When Genevieve receives a surprise visit from an important artist, she begins to hope that, as a woman, she can be accepted as an artist. However, she soon learns that portrait painters have the world at their feet. Rivalries among them lead to sabotage, blackmail and murder and Genevieve gets caught up in their antics. Because she fears being exposed for her conspiracy and betrayal at the Derby Porcelain Factory several years back. The Blue novel is about that betrayal. 

I LOVED this novel. While it is a sequel, new readers should be able to follow the book easily. I would recommend though, that you read The Blue first, mainly because the characters are so strong and the plot picks up right where The Blue left off.  This sequel is just as strong as The Blue, something that does not always happen with a series. There is alot of history in the story as Genevieve interacts with artists such as Joshua Reynolds, George Romney, and Thomas Gainsborough.

The setting descriptions were expertly written into the story. I could feel that I was living in eighteenth century England. Crime and attitudes toward women in the trades were a consistent theme. The problems of women artists was depicted as well. The author also gives us insight into how well courtesans worked together to both seduce and rob their clients. I found it amusing that prostitutes could have that much power. For artists though, competition was high and most of them were overworked and miserable.

All of the characters were memorable, from Genevieve to the famous artists and the secondary characters.  I cannot help but love Genevieve.  She is a headstrong woman intent on getting recognition in her profession. This is something that I can easily relate to as I came of age during the 1970s when women were just beginning to enter the workforce. Her husband is a high moralist but falters easily as most of these kinds of people do. He does not work in Spitalfields or London as he teaches one of the sons of the Earl of Sandwich and is not part of much of the action. His presence in Genevieve's life controls how she behaves though.  Genevieve employs two artists to help her create silk embroidery designs. Caroline is known to have a dark past but we don't really know what that is about until the end of the book. Jean loves politics and supports Genevieve 100% in everything she wants to do. He is quite likable, much more than Caroline.

As far as what the fugitive colors are, I cannot say without giving out too many spoilers. This novel is definitely a must read. 5 out of 5 stars!