Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?

[orlok]

Originally Posted by CRussel

No, I'm reading. Would you claim that reading a Braille book was "touching"? While it is certainly true that the experience is somewhat different, it is still very much reading.

Well said - couldn't agree more.

Now reading (via audiobook ) Dr Yes by Colin Bateman, his third book in the very amusing Mystery Man series.

You don't say no to Dr. Yes, the charismatic plastic surgeon on the fast track to fame and fortune. But when the wife of obscure and paranoid crime writer Augustine Wogan disappears shortly after entering his exclusive clinic, the Small Bookseller with No Name is persuaded to investigate. As fatherhood approaches, our intrepid hero is interested only in a quick buck and the chance to exploit a neglected writer, but he soon finds himself up to his neck in murder, make-up and madness - and face to face with the most gruesome serial killer since the last one.

[Gazella]

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

[ATDrake]

Finished the first truly new book of the new year: The King of Shanghai by Ian Hamilton, 7th and latest in his Ava Lee, Intrepid Globe-Trotting Chinese-Canadian Lapsed Catholic Lesbian Forensic Accountant series of stolen-money-recovering investigative action mysteries that are gradually evolving into international business crime adventure thrillers.

So, this is a continuity-heavy series, and as a result of certain events in #6, Ava's personal and professional lives are continuing to undergo changes, with a shift away from the debt collecting which dominated the first 5 or so books, and more onto other ventures with a hypothetically more sustainable basis.

How sustainable, OTOH, is open to question, as a number of things that happened during earlier debt-collecting missions (which occasionally included some extra-legal tactics to get the money back), are starting to catch up with Ava as she gets caught up in a conflict between new friends and old enemies (not necessarily her own).

Once again, this was a nifty adventure where we got to see a whole lot of How To Set Up A Sustainable Business, alongside How To Negotiate Disputes In Order To Avoid A SPOILER SPOILER (Hopefully), and it was good to see the deepening relationship between Ava and her partners and allies, as well as some old chickens coming home to roost.

Recommended as another entertaining installment in a fun series if you've been following it so far because at this point you really can't read the stories standalone any more (although despite the added seriousness and increased violence as a result thereof of the situation-to-be-solved, it does feel like more of a lightweight installment than previous volumes in the series). We got this one released a little early (they moved it up a month to December), but the next one will have to wait until February 2016, according to the teaser excerpt in the back.

Incidentally, if you're curious about starting the series, which IMHO is excellent and recommended if you're into this sort of thing, Kobo's Boxing Week Holiday Sale (still ongoing until midnight EST today) has in its Canadian version the 1st novel + prequel novella bundle edition of The Water Rat of Wanchai + The Dragon Head of Hong Kong for just $2.99 CAD (couponable), which is a dirt-cheap price considering that I bought it during a previous holiday weekend sale for $4.99 and considered it money well spent when I read it to determine if I wanted to get the other discounted ones (not on sale this time around).

The prequel novella can also be read in full free online @ author Hamilton's Wattpad account as part of some promo for this current new release.

[JSWolf]

Today I finished a novella I started last night. It was quite enjoyable.

Star Trek: TNG: Q are Cordially Uninvited... by Rudy Josephs

An all-new original Star Trek: The Next Generation e-novella!

The wedding of Captain Jean-Luc Picard to Doctor Beverly Crusher was a small, private affair overseen by the mayor of La Barre, France, and witnessed by the groom’s sister-in-law and the mayor’s wife. At least that’s what the happy couple always told their friends. On the anniversary of that blessed day, however, Worf and Geordi La Forge manage to coax the real story out of the pair, to discover a tale of mythical treasure and a lost civilization in the Delta Quadrant. It all begins when the omnipotent being Q crashes the festivities, declaring himself best man and bringing along an unwilling guest as a surprise for the groom…

[JSWolf]

The book I have started reading today is...

Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue by Hugh Howey

It wasn't easy for Molly being the only girl in Flight Academy, but getting expelled was even worse. Abandoned by her family when she was young and now tossed from the only home she's ever known, her future looks bleak.

But then Molly hears that her father's old starship has turned up halfway across the galaxy. Setting off to retrieve the old craft, she hopes it will hold clues to his disappearance. Accompanying her as a chaperone is Cole, her old flight partner from the Academy.

Molly can't believe it. She's now the proud owner of her own starship. Her Spring Break is going to be spent traveling across the galaxy with a cute boy. Could things possibly get any better?

Little does Molly know, they are about to get much, much worse . . .

[CRussel]

Arrgghhh. How am I supposed to keep my buying down if you keep reminding me that there are new books I really want to read out?? I thought I had a bit before The King of Shanghai was out. Sigh. Well, maybe I'll get lucky and the BC Library download site will get it in before I give in to temptation.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Arrgghhh. How am I supposed to keep my buying down if you keep reminding me that there are new books I really want to read out?? I thought I had a bit before The King of Shanghai was out. Sigh. Well, maybe I'll get lucky and the BC Library download site will get it in before I give in to temptation.

At least it'd be money well spent on a book you're sure to enjoy (I'll note that there's less of the particular sort of personally-oriented violence that IIRC both you and I disliked in #5-6)? And on supporting homegrown award-winning Canadian authors as well?

If you can hold out until the next coupon contest comes around, and Kobo keeps it at the current competitive-with-iTunes-and-Amazon new release discount price of $10-ish CAD, maybe you'll luck out on a good code and can get it for a lower cost if the BC Library doesn't oblige in time.

As for me, finished my first-freebie-read-which-led-to-a-discounted-sequel-purchase of the year: the late James Thompson's Snow Angels, 1st in his Inspector Vaara series of Nordic police procedural crime thrillers set in Finland, where Thompson was a long-time resident who apparently unexpectedly died last year. It also happens to have been an Edgar & Anthony Award-finalist for Best First Novel, which we (for UK account-holding values of "we") were offered free late last year.

This was admittedly on the gory violent crimes side of Nordic mystery pieces, which I personally don't really care for but which tend to dominate the subsubgenre, but it was done fairly interestingly, in a very isolated small-town far North setting in Lapland, where a Finnish celebrity actress of Somalian descent has been murdered, and Vaara, whose previous experience has mainly consisted of being a Helsinki detective who thwarted robberies and such, must determine if her death is the racist hate crime it seems to be, a sadistic sex crime masquerading as a racist hate crime, or some sort of stalker/disgruntlement murder masquerading as a sadistic sex crime masquerading as a racist hate crime.

Complicating the investigation is that since it's a small town where everyone knows everyone, several of the suspects are persons with prior ties to Vaara, some of whom he could be reasonably accused of protecting or persecuting, based on the state of his relationships with them, and also that it happens during the holidays, when no one (including his support staff) wants to give up their vacation time.

The whodunnit for this turned out to be surprisingly multi-layered, with Vaara making understandable-in-retrospect false steps and mistaken assumptions during the course of his investigation (although some persons who were investigated did turn out to be guilty of some rather nasty stuff, even if not the particular crime they were being investigated for, so it's kind of like that scene in one Discworld novel where Sam Vimes is looking over a crowd of guests at a fancy reception, idly wondering what each one is guilty of, since the notion that any of them are truly innocent is laughable), and the parties who are ultimately guilty of the initial murder and its related crimes are a bit surprising, but do make sense in the end.

In between, there was some nice background of the bleakness of Arctic circle small village life in wintertime and the positives and negatives of the Finns' adapted mindset, as well as Vaara's US-born wife Kate's own difficulties adjusting to such isolation and the stresses, alongside that of the investigation, puts on their relationship.

Even though I'd have preferred less in the way of apparent psycho-sexual crazed killer-type violence (well, at least it wasn't a serial killer this time, since there are limits to how many I can reasonably assume occupy relatively low-crime Fenno-Scandinavia, even if Finland is supposed to have a per capita murder rate roughly equal to the US' and the highest in the region), I did end up rather enjoying this for the depiction of Finland and the character interactions (and the bits where they kind of end up mocking some of the investigative assumptions which have been influenced by US television and other Nordic noir crime thrillers).

Medium recommend if you're into police procedural crime thrillers set in isolated regions within a small circle of dysfunctional acquaintances, investigated by a professional sleuth who messes up in ways that an amateur couldn't accomplish (and can put up with a certain amount of violence which is sensationalistic even as it deplores the sensationalism). It's a promising start to an interesting-looking series which according to Wikipedia doesn't shy away from the eventual effects on the good Inspector, who seems slated to succumb to a "be careful when battling with monsters, lest you become one" sort of character evolution, which got abruptly derailed due to Author Existence Failure.

I ended up liking this one more than I thought I would, and now I'm curious about what happens next to put Vaara on the trajectory projected by Wikipedia (and what happens to Kate and his other friends along the way). And thus accordingly, I went and bought and started the 2nd-in-series, Lucifer's Tears, which is currently fortuitously on sale for £1.49 from a number of UK outlets (well, not gonna lie, I noticed #2 was deep-discounted from its previous $12-ish CAD equivalent, and put #1 on the list to read to see if I wanted to get it while it was still cheap).

[Stitchawl]

I've gotten about 50 pages into Ben Aaronovitch's "Rivers of London" and it appears to be a fun read! I'm looking forward to this and the rest of his series.


Stitchawl

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by Stitchawl

I've gotten about 50 pages into Ben Aaronovitch's "Rivers of London" and it appears to be a fun read! I'm looking forward to this and the rest of his series.


Stitchawl

Yup. This and the Ian Hamilton series were my two big surprise finds of the year.

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The book I have started reading today is...

Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue by Hugh Howey

I've got those. Keep meaning to get to 'em, too...

[Hampshire Nanny]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

I've started Brian Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy. It's a single volume e-book; does that count as one book or three?

I always count the books in an omnibus individually. So, with HarryT's excellent compilation of The Chronicles of Barsetshire , I count it as six books (though I didn't manage to read all 6 of them in a single year).

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Rev. Bob

I've got those. Keep meaning to get to 'em, too...

I'm not that far into it, but so far it's good.

[alansplace]

Originally Posted by alansplace

I got about 1/4 through Death Before Wicket and because of the holidays kinda' stalled there! I did sneak in a fanfic short story in the Dresden Files universe called Good Intentions and it can be read here! It was excellent, I liked it a lot. It helped fill the time gap (I'm waiting patiently) between 'Skin Game' and the publication of the upcoming 'Peace Talks'.

Originally Posted by alansplace

Still, because of the holidays, I'm kinda' stalled, but a bit further on (56%) in Death Before Wicket! Also I can blame it a little on finding a $.99 special (good through Friday Jan 9th) on Moriarty: Anna Kronberg Trilogy (Kronberg Crimes #1-3) by Annelie Wendeberg. I've read the first 25 pages of the first of the three included novels, The Devil's Grin.

I completed my read of Death Before Wicket this evening. It was quite as enjoyable a read as the first 9 books in the series and I look forward to the last 9 that are still left. Now on to the Moriarty Trilogy and its first novel, The Devil's Grin.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Hampshire Nanny

I always count the books in an omnibus individually. So, with HarryT's excellent compilation of The Chronicles of Barsetshire , I count it as six books (though I didn't manage to read all 6 of them in a single year).

That genuinely is six books, as opposed to, say, "The Lord of the Rings", which is a single book that's sometimes published in three volumes.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: Lightspeed Magazine #56 edited by John Joseph Adams. The latest issue from my subscription that I got through their 2014 Kickstarter.

I'm also reading (in an old hardback!) Catweazle by Richard Carpenter. A novelisation of a TV series from my youth.