Tag: 2014 Reads

Sanctus Book 1 of the Sancti Trilogy – Simon Toyne

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SanctusInside the Citadel in the ancient city of Ruin resides a select group of monks charged with protecting the Sacrament, along with thousands of ancient texts discovered over the millennium.  The nature of the Sacrament is known only to a select few of those monks – the Sancti. But when Brother Samuel is initiated into the Sancti, and discovers what the Sacrament is, he decides can not live with that knowledge or continue to belong to the Sancti. He makes a harrowing and torturous climb to the top of the Citadel, where he stands for hours in a pose symbolic of the Tau, the symbol of the Sancti, before plunging to his death. So begins Sanctus, first book of the Ruin trilogy from British author Simon Toyne. The questions left unanswered are: Why did he do it? What did he see that lead him to take his own life?

I picked up Sanctus in Dollar General for $3.00 because it looked like the type of book that I enjoy, one that combines history with action and while the historic aspects of the story are somewhat fictional the action and the characters more than make up for it. The key character in the book is newspaper reporter Liv Adamson, who is the identical twin of Brother Samuel. Actually, they were the first conjoined twins to be different sexes. The story revolves around Liv’s attempt to discover the why of Samuel’s death. Liv hadn’t seen her brother in eight years and assumed was dead!  Of course, the Sancti want no one to know the secret of the Sacrament, and will do anything to stop Liv’s search, while others including members of an ancient rival religious sect of the Sancti want to help!

Sanctus is rather lengthy 578 pages, but the writing is crisp, and the characters and action kept me turning the pages quickly, particularly through the second half of the book, once I knew all the players!

Several of the reviews of Sanctus, I read at Goodreads.com were negative because the readers felt that Toyne did not develop the  city or the people of Ruin realistically enough. The reviewers felt the setting could be any city or police force in the US or the world. Again, I thought the action and characters more than made up for any lack of geographic  “sense of place”. I did feel that the descriptions and feel for the Citadel, the mountain fortress of the Sancti, was well done. I had a feel for the dark library that housed thousands of historic documents and the spectral images of the monks that worked within the library

Bottom Line: I thoroughly enjoyed the book and will  move on quickly to the second book in the trilogy – The Key. I think that if you enjoy the books of Dan Brown and Chris Kuzneski you’ll enjoy Sanctus.

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Book 34 for 2014 – Here’s the Trailer for Sanctus

Harry Dolan’s Very Bad Men (David Loogan Series #2)

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Very Bad Men

Harry Dolan’s Very Bad Men is the second book in the David Loogan series,  Dolan’s follow-up to Bad Things Happen about which Stephen King  said….. “Great F****ing Book Man, I was totally hooked”  I am in total agreement with the great Mr. King’s assessment of Bad Things Happen and I feel the same way about  Very Bad Men!!

In Harry Dolan’s Very Bad Men, David Loogan and Elizabeth Waishkey have settled down to a simple life  after the tumultuous events in Bad Things Happen, until one day when David, as editor of Gray Streets magazine receives a manuscript that begins “ I killed Henry Kormoran”.  Not  long after David receives the manuscript, Detective Waishkey is assigned to a new murder case – Henry Kormoran,  and once again it appears that David and Elizabeth are on the trail of a psychotic killer. This time the killer is targeting members of a gang that attempted to rob the Great Lakes Bank seventeen years prior! During the attempted robbery Terry Dawtrey shot Sheriff Harlan Spencer, leaving Spencer paralyzed.  Now, Spencer’s daughter Callie is running for the Senate and the current killings are dredging up old memories about the robbery that may upset Callie’s campaign, especially with investigative  reporter Lucy Navarro on the case for the tabloid The National Current!  The question becomes who and why is somebody targeting these men after such a long time.??? Is it Callie and her campaign, was she involved in the robbery?  Or is it someone else??

Harry Dolan

Thoughts About Very Bad Men

Harry Dolan once again delivers a top-notch, intricately plotted mystery. While the setting is the present  day, the writing  creates a feel similar to one that one gets when reading Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. Does anyone else see Humphrey Bogart playing David Loogan!

The characters are vivid and the twists and turns of the plot keep the reader guessing and, at least for me, quickly turning the pages!!

Grade  A+

Bottomiine:

A series that, while it is still in its infancy, is getting better with each book, and I can’t wait to move on  to the next installment The Last Dead Girl..

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Book 33 for 2014

Your Life Calling:Reimagining the Rest of Your Life – Jane Pauley

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Your Life CallingWhen I saw Jane Pauley’s book.Your Life Calling in the library last week it was like, yes! This is the right book at the right time! And while it was not exactly what I anticipated, it was nevertheless a good read. See two months ago, I applied for Social Security, more out of necessity than actually wanting to retire. Throughout this past year, the work that I have done for the last 34 years,  has just not been there, and I have mostly been collecting unemployment and thinking about how I want to move forward with my life. I really don’t want to go out and find another job doing  the same thing that I have done, so when my unemployment insurance ran out, rather than just take any job, I applied for my benefits and upped my hours at Target. So far,it has been a good thing, but  I still keep wondering, is this all there really is, or is there something else out there that I would want to do!!

This is what  Your Life is Calling is all about, In the book Pauley provides ideas and thoughts about reimagining your life through the stories of those who have done it.  Pauley in her Dateline voice, tells the stories of folks like Betsy McCarthy who traded her executive briefcase for knitting needles, Gid Pool, who launched a career as a stand-up comic, Richard Rittmaster, who joined the National Guard Chaplain Corps: Trudy Lundgren who took her home on the road in an RV; Paulie Gee, who opened a successful pizzeria and many more. The two stories that were the mostly  inspirational were  the Jenny Bowman who established the Half the Sky Foundation which began with the adoption of an infant girl in China and the story of Ken Woods, who was selling his drill rig in Maryland and ended up  traveling to Ghana and drilling over a thousand wells, providing thousands with clean water, all at his own expense ! 

As I look back over the  book, while I’ m writing this, I am saying to myself, hey that was a good story and that one was too, and I wish I could do something like that! So I guess I did ‘like the book more than I thought! I think that the whole thing was that the book really wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, a nuts and bolts book on how to reimagine your life, but rather it’s a book that through the stories of those who have done it,  what you can do, if  you try…. maybe Michael J Fox sums it up best….

“Jane Pauley is a wonderful guide to all the different ways you can open new doors in life, many of which lead to unexpected places. She shows with humor and a great generosity of spirit why the journey to reinvention can come from all kinds of places and produce all kinds of joys”

then there’s Jim Lehrer who writes….

“Well, here it is – finally. The guide for baby boomers on getting from here to there – from a state of panic over how to live the rest of their lives to a state of passion and performance as they do so  with grace and pleasure. Read it and then go!!

While I still don’t have a plan about what I am going to do with the rest of my life, this book certainly made me think about what may be possible and that maybe now, instead of doing the work that I HAD to do, I can do the work that I WANT to do! (Figuring out what that is – is still  my problem!) Anyway, the book should be checked out by all us boomers!!

Book 30 for 2014

Amanda Kyle Williams’ The Stranger You Seek’s strong ending leads to Book 2 of the series!

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The Stranger You SeekSo last week I wrote that I was struggling through The Stranger You Seek the first of the Keye Street novels from Amanda Kyle Williams. Tonight I went to the library to get book 2 in the series Stranger in the Room! It’s easy to explain the reason , stealing and editing a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail “It Got Better!!

I guess that it took a while for the story to grab me, but once it did it didn’t let go until the last twist and turn in the plot! The protagonist of the book is Keye Street, an ex-FBI profiler who was a rising star in the agency, until her alcohol addiction brought her career crashing down. Now Keye is a working PI in Atlanta chasing down bail jumpers, catching adulterers, serving subpoenas, that is until her best friend Atlanta Police Detective Aaron Rauser calls her to help him out on a grisly murder case. The case’s profile quickly  rises soon turning into a hunt, for the “Wishbone” killer. As the killer taunts Rauser and Street, the hunt turns personal, with Keye and Rauser in the killer’s crosshairs.

Now, back to the problems that I see as minor and were overcome  by the storyline.  Elizabeth B. in her review at Goodreads didn’t see it that way though… she wrote……

… The main character was just the most annoying narrator ever. It was as if every problem a person could have was built in by the author. Flawed is one thing but you pretty easily degenerate into Mary Sue-ish and that’s exactly what happened here. Freakish name? Check. Bad family history? Check. Discrimination from childhood? Check. Drugs and/or alcohol abuse? Check. But I’m a survivor and will overcome everything all by my lonesome? Check.  Read More At…Goodreads

I really didn’t think it was that bad and by the end of the book, I liked Keye and Rauser, and saw them as a team that I could root for!

Bottom line: A strong twisting ending made the book a good read and a series that I will follow at least into the next book Stranger in the Room. so Check it Out!

Grade: B – over the first half of the book, A for the last so I guess that’s a B+!!

Book No 28 for 2014….

Here’s the trailer for the book!