Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Review of Under the Microscope by Jane Bennett Munro
Title: Murder Under the Microscope
Author: Jane Bennett Munro
Genre: Mystery
Price: $ 5.99 ebook/ $ 18.93 Paperback
Publisher: iuniverse.com
ISBN-10: 1450298621
Reviewed by: Erica Moulton
I love a good murder mystery. Ones with twists and turns. I know it is a good book if I am tempted to skip right to the end because I can't stand the suspense of who-did-it-and-why. That is why I could not pass up an opportunity to review Murder Under the Microscope by Forensic Pathologist Jane Bennett Munro.
Dr. Munro's in depth knowledge of pathology and how a hospital functions is evident in the book. The writing is thick with jargon related to the medical field and sometimes it was over my head. Despite this, I did enjoy the book. I thought it had a strong story line with just enough scandal to make it interesting but still keeping it plausible. I do think that in the future, some research into how crimes are solved would be beneficial as I had a hard time buying that the police would involve a suspect as deeply as they involved Dr. Day (main character in the book).
In the novel, Dr. Munro seemed to have infused two story lines together in one novel. Building up to and solving the murder would have been satisfying enough to entertain the reader without the introduction of another complication of a blast from the past clouding the current storyline. I would have preferred to have followed the storyline of the blast from the past in a separate novel. Both story lines made for entertaining stories, just when together at times it was overwhelming to keep up with it all. Sometimes less is more and with 418 pages in this one novel, the content could have easily been split into two.
I am giving a rating of 6.5/10.
Rating: 6.5/10
Saturday, December 28, 2013
BookTrakr
BookTrakr is a site that promises to track your self-published sales from the main platfroms such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords. I am trying the beta version and would be interested in hearing from other authors trying this or similar services.
Good points
1) A really useful service especially for platfroms like kindle that are difficult to use and do not store lifetime sales data.
2) So far it seems pretty easy to use.
Issues
1) You have to give log in details for each platform which is not something everyone will be comfortable with, and it means that data is out there on another site and so more vulnerable to hacking etc.
2) Eventually this will become a service you have to pay for.
3) The sales data seems accurate except it does nto seem to count returns, but the earnings data seems way off so I would not use this for accounting.
4) I am having glitchs with some checked and accurate log in data not be accepted.
Monday, December 23, 2013
REVIEW: Embustero
Saturday, December 14, 2013
REVEIW: Doubt
Author: Anne-Rae Vasquez
Genre: Fantasy
Price: $1.99 (ebook)
Publisher: AR Publishing
ISBN: B00F35AEGW
Point of Sale: Amazon
Reviewed by: Psyche
While the notion of beautiful young people using a video game to organize a revolutionary social movement might sound exciting, it fails somewhat in the execution. There are a lot of characters who are quite bitchy towards each other. The story gets bogged down in details that never seem to have much significance.
My inability to find any of the characters interesting, and the vagueness of key facts like what the Truth Seekers game is, and what it was designed to to, prevented me from developing any real interest in the story. My feeling is that if this had been written with a better focus on the two main characters and their goals (especially Harry's) it would have been the first half of a much better novel.
2/5
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
REVIEW: Sherlocked:The Secret of the Holy Death
Author: Asif Khan
Genre: Mystery
Price: $2.99 (ebook)
Publisher: None
ISBN: B00EJJKK8A
Point of Sale: Amazon
Reviewed by: veinglory
As suggested by the title, Sherlocked by Asif Khan is BBC Sherlock fan-fiction. It includes the named mentioned of characters from the show including Sally Donovan. On the other hand Watson is shown as a practicing doctor, which is not the case in the BBC version.
There are serious issues throughout the story with grammar, punctuation, and tense. Also people are constantly thinking and speaking in exclamations (!). And the cover has nothing to do with the story at all, which is a tad disappointing.
Quite long sections take on unnecessarily detailed and technically correct form. I discovered that this is because they come straight from Wikipedia, for example: "The Bengal tiger's coat is yellow to light orange, with stripes ranging from dark brown to black; the belly and the interior parts of the limbs are white, and the tail is orange with black rings."
The mystery itself is competent but not especially clever, and the entire story takes only a few minutes to read. So, given the poor technical quality and inappropriate fan-fiction elements I think I have to give this one 1/10.
Sunday, December 01, 2013
REVIEW: Dogging
Point of Sale: Amazon
Reviewed by: Psyche Skinner
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
REVIEW: The Big Dash
At last week's Windycon, I bought The Big Dash from Eggplant Literary Productions. Eggplant is a small e-press, which until recently was focused on novellas. (They just opened to novels.)
The Big Dash is one of their novellas, and is hard-boiled SF. It's the kind of story where a character will say something like "he tried to play some chin music in the key of Me-flat" and deliver said line with (presumably) a straight face. The story is narrated by Jaxon Test, security chief on the FTL ship Arrow. He's a standard hard-boiled "ship's dick" and is nominally on a milk run, which includes escorting the daughter of a major shareholder of the ship's company. (She and her father are both aliens, by the way.)
Of course, the milk run proves to be anything but, which is what makes the story entertaining. The science portion of the story is pretty light - FTL just works and trips between stars are a matter of days - but the entertainment value is high.
I personally found The Big Dash very enjoyable.
8/10
Monday, November 18, 2013
REVIEW: The Quiet Front
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Interesting Guardian Category
Wednesday, October 09, 2013
Monday, September 23, 2013
REVIEW: Cubs to Bonanzas
Monday, September 16, 2013
REVIEW: Kindreds: An Alliance of Bloods
Sunday, September 08, 2013
REVIEW: Dialogues of a Crime
Tuesday, September 03, 2013
Review: Between These Pages -- C A MacKenzie
Author: CA MacKenzie
Genre: Short Stories
Price: $2.99 (ebook)
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
ASN: B00DP3RDOA
Point of Sale: Amazon
Reviewed by: Psyche Skinner
I read "Between These Pages" over a fairly extended period simply because life suddenly became very busy. Not all of the stories are good but enough are great to make up for it, making this a very readable collection. I started off not particularly engrossed, but by about half way through the stories became sharper. They more often ended with a satisfying twisted, or an ambiguity that was thought provoking rather than simply baffling.
Perhaps it is because the author ordered the stories by the age of the protagonists, and older characters naturally have more depth and pathos. Or perhaps because the elements of infidelity, troubled relationships and murder go from being repetitive to genuine themes as each story adds a new layer.
As high points I would point to stories with vivid images like the wife with a mannequin made in her image ("The Mannequin") or the woman sinking (is is she?) into a geothermal sinkhole ("Trapped in the Swallow"). Others may be somewhat shaky in execution but are intriguing in theme like a society where the road toll has gone from an unconscious sacrifice to a civic responsibility ("The Quota").
My favorite, strangely enough given my lifelong love of gothic horror, is the one completely nice and happy story in the collection. Although it appears near the beginning, "Away with the Fairies" feels like closes the loop of the repeated themes by showing how the older generation can help the younger steer them away from the tragedies that beset the characters in the other stories in the collection.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
REVIEW: Hegemony
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
REVIEW: Deep Blood
Sunday, July 14, 2013
REVIEW: Disconnect
Disconnect is a very readable YA dystopian story where a space station that has drifted far from its primary mission has divided into two entrenched classes. Our hero, Zach, a lowly scavenger accidentally makes contact with a girl from the world above, just before their whole society begins to change.
The fast pace and high stakes make this a very enjoyable story and there is an interesting twist at the end. However, to me, the world building has implausible elements, the characters sometimes lack depth, and Zach gets a lucky break on several dozen occasions. So I ultimately had trouble with how Zach fell into his central role in the brewing revolution.
A lot of readers are probably not going to get hung up on those elements like I was so--so if you are looking for any easy-reading adventure with elements of sci fi and romance, this is probably a good book to choose.
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
REVIEW: Drifting Away
Sunday, June 23, 2013
REVIEW X.
Editor: Matt Thompson
Genre: Mystery
Price: $0.99 (ebook)
Point of Sale: Amazon
Reviewed by: Psyche
I am a bit surprised that I liked this book. Objectively speaking the protagonist is a selfish loser. The writing is full of semi-pretentious quirks like excessive footnotes. But I did; I did like this book. Sometimes it is just something ineffable about a book that does that. Either that or I suck as reviewing. One of those things.
There is something about how Cale is written that makes his desperation in dealing with his messed up impulses, his half-hearted marriage, and his one messed-up friendship strangely fascinating. This is certainly not a heart warming tale but it also resists being completely nihilistic. It was somewhat reminiscent of The Losers by David Eddings, another book I liked even though it doesn't have anything I normally look for in a book. (It could use a touch more copy-editing.)
7.5/10
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Kiwi Society of Author Reinvents Square Wheel
I predict that will go as well as it usually does when you:
1) Become a gate-keeper without actually being a publisher who determines quality based on some kind of real world functional standard (e.g. book sell well, book gets awards), and
2) combine collecting membership dues with tell some of those members that their work is not good enough.
Which is to say: badly.
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
REVIEW: BASH by Mike Bartos
Editor: Mike Bartos
Genre: Mystery
Price: $0.99 (ebook)
Publisher: XLIBRIS
Point of Sale: Amazon
Reviewed by: Psyche
This book creates an ensemble of characters connected by a psychiatric hospital that is mired in bureaucracy, weighted down by budget cuts and striving just to deliver basic care to their sometimes dangerous criminal patients. The story is constructed so you simply cannot hurry through it. You get to know everyone, for the most part nice, well-meaning, but flawed characters struggling through middle-age, professional crises and the demand for professional and personal duties, with a few villains sprinkled into the mix. I will admit that by halfway through I groaned a little as yet another character got introduced with a multi-page brief biographies of their life up until the point they enter the story. They are all marvelous character, but this is closing in on “too much of a good thing”.
At first I was surprised that the blurb discloses something that doesn’t happen until a third of the way through the book. But in retrospect you kind of need to know where this story is going in order to understand why you are strolling there through the lives of a dozen different people: patients, nurses, doctors, journalists and so on. I would say that having only the doctor in first person does not make sense to me as he first appears well into the story and Ash is much closer to being the protagonist of the piece. So the change in person seems a bit arbitrary, or like authorial intrusion.
While not every part of the book was to my tastes I have to give it 9/10 for sheer, pulled-together storytelling. I would, however, suggest that the cover doesn’t really match the book.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
About Kirkus Indies
Kirkus is a legit review site that people are impressed by, right?
To some extent: yes. But when it comes to their fee-charging site Kirkus Indies: no. In most cases all that a review from this site proves is that the author had $425 to waste. There are some exceptions where authors who know how to market took advantage of the perceived prestige of the Kirkus name with certain reading audiences.
Kirlkus indies will always trash your books because their reviewers are from rival publishers.
No. You may have paid them money, but that was for the review, not what was in it. The review will be honest, possibly scathingly so, possibly constructed specifically to prevent you from pulling out any positive phrases to use in your marketing efforts. If the reviewer hated your book, they just hated your book. It happens.
Even trade publisher and best-selling authors pay for their Kirkus Review.
No, the don't. They go to the main Kirkus site and submit their book many months before publication in the hope of getting a free review that will be placed on the main website, not the Indies online ghetto. This approach to getting a review is free.
Monday, June 10, 2013
REVIEW: For the Night is Dark
Editor: Ross Warren
Genre: Horror
Price: $5.99 (ebook)
Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
ISBN: 0992170729
Point of Sale: Amazon
Reviewed by: Emily Veinglory
The great strength of this anthology is the way the stories have a strong sense of place and convincing, realistic characters. Across all of the stories it begins to feel like the bogey monster of this day and age is the chav (or whatever your regional term for youths from the ghetto is), or the under-privileged world they are forced to grow up in and the destructive role of abusive parenting. Of particular note: 21 Brooklands by Carole Johnstone which will probably stick in my mind for some time. This Darkness by John Claude Smith is also notable, it feels somewhat like a parable about the redemption that can only be found by hitting bottom.
There were some stories with notably original elements. God May Pity All Weak Hearts by Daniel I. Russel retells the Dr. Crippen murder. On a Midnight Black Chessie by Kevin Lucia finds horror in a very unlikely place. And How the Dark Bleeds by Jasper Bark seems to effortlessly create a whole mythology around the layered story of the protagonist within just a few short pages.
If there is any criticism I would make it is that many of the stories don't quite close conclusively and give a feeling of resolution. Exceptions being the under-stated pathos in the conclusion of the zombie story Darker with the Day by Scott Nicholson and the tightly plotted A Snitch in Time by Robert W Walker.
Overall this collection represents what a good horror anthology should be. A somewhat uneven groups of stories but none that are without merit, misogynist or mindlessly gratuitous--traits that hobble many other publishers in this genre. At the center of almost all of these stories there is a fate that is genuinely horrific if contemplated, and that resonates with the horrors that do or could exist in the real world.
7/10
Friday, May 31, 2013
Sunday, May 05, 2013
Amazon Recommends...
I guess my browsing and buying has been pretty diverse? Or are genre boundaries just not as important as they use to be when it comes to online shopping? Because these books do have a lot of common elements in style and tone, just not so much in terms of literal subject matter.
Friday, May 03, 2013
REVIEW: The Rebel Within
Wednesday, May 01, 2013
REVIEW: Be Careful What You Wish For
Monday, April 29, 2013
Review Scores
And mostly they seem to skew pretty positive. 8/10 is the single most common rating, although I would note that is only one 9.5/10 and no 10/10s so far.
Sunday, April 28, 2013
REVIEW, Hidden Secrets, Whispered Lies
Author: Lisa McCourt Hollar
Genre: Poetry
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
Publisher: Kindle
ASIN: B004UWPDUG
Reviewed by: Emily Veinglory
The poetry in the collection is dark and emotive, but it depends heavily on over-used images such as vampires, darkness, chains and broken wings. The majority of the poems also have the same subject: a female in love with the wrong guy.
Some of the formatting does not seem mindful to me. Like every line starting with a capital letter, most likely because MSWord does this automatically? Use of the possessive apostrophe and other capitalization seems erratic.
I might have been able to recommend this, at least during period where it is free, except that this collection alternates dizzyingly between reveling in subjects like self-mutilatory cutting and necrophilia, and shrill preaching against drug use and abortion. This strange brand of 'gothic moralising' made reading this short book actually fairly unpleasant for me.
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
It isn't me, it's you....
I mean, I have read some doozy introductions by authors, from explanations that the author is a prophet of God to assertions that they (as a fan fic writer) know the characters far better than the person who created them.
And then there is this:
"...there are still a review 'hate' reviews. But guess what? That's okay, because those people weren't right for the book."
He goes on to quote and rebut and criticize some specific Amazon reviews, in the book. So the first thing this book says to me is "if this book doesn't work for you, it is because you suck".
Ooookay.
I was checking the book out because the author is actively soliciting reviews, but somehow I think I will be passing on this one.
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Review of Pinned: A Kentucky True Crime Book by Charles W. Massie
Title: Pinned: A Kentucky True Crime
Author: Charles W. Massie
Genre: Non-Fiction/ True Crime
Price: $8.99 (eBook) / $ 19.95 Paperback
Publisher: Outskirts Press, Inc.
ASIN: B00BYCZS5A
Reviewed by: Erica Moulton
I knew it had to happen eventually. My first negative review. I was really excited about this book, partly because of it being true crime and partly because of the subject being from upstate New York like myself. It made it that much more disappointing that I really disliked this novel.
The author tells a very jaded tale of being scorned by a woman who he met on the internet. Who he moved in with pretty much as soon as they met in person. Neither party had a steady source of income or employment, both sound a bit selfish and they spent more time having sex than getting to know one another. Odd that this relationship failed.
The true crime aspect of the book stems from a possession of marijuana charge. Of course, he is completely innocent and must have been set up by the woman who rejected him and ended up with his friend. He wrote an entire book trying to shine a negative light on her, an innocent light on himself and point fingers at her for murder, for theft, for setting him up. He claims the local police are in bed with her and helped set him up.
The book is long (386 pages) but not filled with quality content. A lot of the material should have been removed as it does not add to the storyline. In one chapter, he prepares a spaghetti dinner and goes into detail about how he prepared it. Right down to opening up a jar of Ragu sauce and what flavor it was. It feels jumbled and unorganized. He rehashes the same points several times throughout the book.
There are several sex scenes in the book, which I’m not opposed to. What I am opposed to is several sex scenes which are pretty much the same scene/actions over and over. Of course, the scenes are wrote to suggest the two are rock stars in the bedroom with unending stamina. Yawn.
If you are very bitter about the loss of a love and feel that you have been set up by this person, then you may find some comfort in knowing you are not alone by reading this. I, however, did not enjoy this book at all. If I did not select this book to review and would have been reading as a personal selection, I doubt I would have finished it. I do know for sure that in the event I ever find myself divorced, after reading this book I doubt I will ever place an online dating ad. In the future, I will be sure that True Crime means more than just a possession charge as well.
I am giving a rating of 2/10 only because the author did take the time to write out such a lengthy book.
Rating: 2/10