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Reading and reviews, Thrillers

Review: Red Queen, Antonia Scott #1 (Juan Gomez-Jurado)

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We begin the book with a kidnapping, and it doesn’t slow down very much from that point: a kidnapping, multiple murders, a corrupt cop, a forensics genius, a mysterious organization, an arrogant cop, and an aging journalist. There’s a lot going on here. Unfortunately, there are too many coincidences, a heroine that is described as special, which turns out to be a genius-level intelligence [aired with some kind of monstrous and odd medical experiment that turned her into an Asperger’s like character who is much like Sherlock Holmes or The “Bones” character from the tv series, based on a book series. Antonia Scott is her name, and she blames herself for her husband’s injuries during a police operation, which left him reliant on machines to keep him alive – basically, in a vegetative state.

She is teamed up with Jon Guitierrez, the aforementioned corrupt cop – because he was accused of planting drugs in the car of a suspect – who is also a fat gay man who lives with his mother. Toss a trope on that bonfire of pile of crimes and such up there. Jon is approached by a man who belongs to a super secret organization that works on particular crimes. He recruits Jon by, one, offering to pay him, since Jon is currently suspended, and two, telling him that all he has to do is convince Antonia to get in a car and then drive her to a particular address.

This unlikely pair is assigned to look into the case of a young man who was abducted and killed, then staged in the house of a super-rich family. It’s also a case of mistaken identity, as the young man is not the son of woman they were attempting to extort. And this is the point at which Antonia’s bizarre behavior and manner of seeing the scene begin. She also draws several conclusions that seem to be a bit premature. Whatever the case, they are then pulled out of that and reassigned by the mystery man (codename: Mentor).

The pair are then told to start looking at another crime, this time the kidnapping of a woman who is the daughter of what sounded to me like a billionaire. Interestingly, he has receive a all from the kidnapper(s), with a bizarre directive for him to say something publicly that would be highly embarrassing. They learn that in the other case, the woman who runs one of the largest banks in Madrid (and it seems all of Spain) has received a similar call and demand. Obviously neither of the two want to submit to these demands.

What follows from here is a series of leaps of logic, actions taken by Antonia and Jon that in any reasonable law enforcement organization would result in them not just being taken off the cases but tossed into jail. As it turns out, the ranking investigator from the local police – the typical arrogant local law enforcement dude with a giant ego who thinks himself always right – kicks them out of the crime scenes. They ignore him, naturally, returning to both scenes when the locals are gone.

There come some coincidences, and a bunch of flashbacks too tell us how Antonia changed from just a very smart woman into some kind of crime scene whisperer/savant. I won’t go further into the plot in current (book-wise) time. But I will say that the astute reader who takes in the details will be able to determine the kidnapper/murderer as well as the incident that started everything and pretty much how the book will end.

I will add this warning: the kidnapped woman is put in a cell of sorts that is rock and does not have the vertical clearance for her to stand up, basically making it a long stone box. If you’re claustrophobic, this might be an issue for you, as it was for me.

There were a lot of ideas here, and I think the idea of Antonia and what she can do is quite interesting. But it seems to have made her some kind of superhero. For instance: when the pair need to bribe someone, and don’t have the funds to do it, she teaches herself a card game, goes to an online gambling site, and wins enough to pay of the guys they need to get information out of in less tan half an hour. It’s all just running around from that point to reach the end.

It is an ok read. Not great, not the worst I’ve ever read. For the middle of the road it took, it’s a three. I’ll read the next one, probably.

Three stars out of five.

Thanks to St Martin’s Press and NetGalley for the reading copy.

LesRom, Mysteries, Reading and reviews

Review: Protecting the Lady (Amanda Radley)

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Spoilers, ho!

Katherine Lovegrove, a distant heir to the English throne – think higher than two dozen steps – and daughter of judge Michael Lovegrove receives threats from an organized crime family because the latter is about to sentence the daughter of the head of the family to a lot of time in prison.

Eve Webb is a former protection agent, resigning from her job because of a double bombing – one immediate, one shortly after in order to catch first responders to the scene -and because she not only thinks she could have done more (how??) but because of the way information is compartmentalized and she thinks the intelligence services should be sharing information about things like threats of bombings so they can all work together to address threats. I don’t have much optimism about this, no matter how this book ends. She’s living in Tokyo, teaching English here and there and basically barely making ends meet. Her former boss now runs his own show, and goes to Tokyo to get her back to protect Katherine. There’s quite a bit of money involved, so Eve says yes and they return to London. Eve knows nothing about the job, the specific threat(s), or the protectee. You can see where this is going when we find out Eve is a staunch anti-monarchist.

And of course it does: Eve threatens her boss that she’ll quit on the spot because she is opposed to protecting a royal, no matter how distant, but he pleads with her to meet with someone: the judge. After hearing him out, Eve reluctantly agrees to do the job.

Katherine, trying to have her own life, objects, of course, and then goes on to have a childlike hissy fit about Eve staying in her apartment with her. The very next day – when her father hands down the sentence – a brick is thrown through her office window. Obviously, she won’t be able to work there in person, as it puts everyone else at risk, so off they go to a very large manor (or very small castle, depending on your viewpoint): her childhood home. Where she promptly locks herself in her room. Like a child, instead of a grown woman almost 40 years old.

Eve’s unhappy as well, and gets more people from her boss to help guard the castle, which, from a protection standpoint, is not a bad place to be: clear lines of sight, thick walls, and easy coverage of access points. It’s a dream!

Except Katherine doesn’t want to be there, doesn’t want Eve and her crew on the site, and generally is petulant. She convinces Eve to allow her to attend a charity ball that she’s been organizing for a year, and where she gets people to open their wallets wide, and Eve agrees after determining not that that’s an easy place to protect Katherine but that it means so damn much to her. This would be a signal that you’re allowing your judgement to be impaired because you’re falling in love with he protectee even though there’s no real chemistry going on.

And on that note, one other item: close protection duties mean close and almost always in contact. Alas, here, Eve and Katherine are not particularly close nor in constant contact with one another, so it’s a bit mystifying how these two start falling for one another when they’re also on different sides of things, attitude and royalty-wise, and Katherine has had a stick up her hind end about the lack of need of Eve’s services in the first place.

In any case, they’re on the way back to the castle afterwards, and someone takes a shot at the car, injuring the driver and causing Eve to jump into action, telling Katherine to get down, and taking over driving duties to get them to safety. Katherine is then at the castle, and Eve is off to a briefing with her boss. One again: not close, not in contact.

There are also no questions/discussions given over to the reader about the potshot at the car. Routes are varied, and they never take the same route twice, so how did anyone know? The obvious answer, of course: there’s a mole. Either this does not occur to Eve or her boss, or the reader is left out until later. The former would be rather silly for experienced protection service people, and the latter is, I think, unfair.

Eve, deciding she’s too close to Katherine, feely-wise, decides to hand over protection to someone else, and scoots. Katherine is promptly kidnapped, courtesy of someone ramming the car – again, how does anyone know the route?

Eve and her boss finally realize there’s a mole, and there’s a showdown in Ops, with Eve taking a guy to the floor and punching staples into his back until he gives up the location.

This leads to a bunch of services working together to retrieve Katherine, and Eve is there, leading Katherine out of the warehouse where she’d been stashed (and beaten), and where the head of the organized crime family has pulled a Stupid Thing, by being there on premises so the law can catch him, because daughter for daughter something something, even though his daughter is both not beaten and is also not dead.

So Eve and Katherine are reunited, and are now totally In Love, despite barely seeing one another through the whole book, and also apparently having worked out that whole royal-anti-monarchist thing in record time. The get the HEA, naturally.

As much as I hate the instalove trope, I recognize that it’s a handy way to cut out many chapters of a book and get to the chase, so to speak. But you have to decide what the book is: is it a romance, with occasional flashes of mystery and danger? Or is it primarily a mystery/action/thriller, with occasional romance and/or sexytimes (note: there are no sexytimes in this book)? It’s also fine if it it is both in equal measures, of course. I don’t think this worked on any of the three. There isn’t enough action except at the end for me to believe Katherine is any real danger that couldn’t be averted. There is no chemistry and no romance. The only balance between the two is a distinct lack of either. I’d have read twice the number of pages to get either or both.

It sounds like I’m just pounding on this, but I’m not – I’m just demanding because I want good stories and I want them to make sense. YMMV on every point I’ve made before now, but I imagine the last one is true for everyone.

Two and a half stars out of five, sadly rounded down to two.

Thanks to Bold Stroke Books and NetGalley for the reading copy.

Mysteries, Reading and reviews

Review: The Night Lawyer (Alex Churchill)

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This book could not decide what it wanted to be. There are three stories here: one is Sophie Angel, barrister, who works one night a week at a local paper to review the stories they’re about to post online. The rest of the time,she works on the defense side of the legal system. The second is a mystery surrounding Sophie’s past in the USSR, and the death of her uncle Kiril: her Russian father, a musician, defected while on tour, and her English mother, with Sophie, walked to the English Embassy in Moscow and left the country that way. The third is the well worn trope of a woman who marries a man (who cheated on his wife with her) who everyone but her knows is cheating on her, but she has trouble believing it.

Any one of these things would have been interesting – in fact, it would be great if the writing duo delved into the Russian story, because I’d read that in a heartbeat.

There are probably some spoilers in this, so if you want to read this, I’d skip to the bottom.

As it stands, we get a prologue that is a bit creepy, but not really necessary, in my opinion. The actual first chapters deal with Sophie turning down the defense of a violent rapist (and I suppose we’re supposed to believe that the rapist, who has escaped prison that day has turned up at the newspaper somehow, in that prologue). The next part deals with someone buying the paper where Sophie works as the night lawyer. The wife of the buyer is Russian, and there seems to be some history between her and Sophie, although Sophie has little memory of her time in Russia. It occurred to me that since we get only a couple of scenes at the paper that this whole paper thing and the buyout of it was done just to get these two characters together.

Lydia (the Russian wife) asks Sophie to defend a young man accused of rape. His mother, and the young man, of course say he is innocent, and he may very well be. This part of the book is heavily focused on the legal system in England, and it’s heavy on jargon from that system. If you don’t know what solicitors and barristers are, or what a dock is in a courtroom, you may get a little lost, but it’s still readable. Clearly, one (or both) of the writers has a great interest in the legal system and how it is (as in the US) heavily skewed against poor people.

Throughout the book, we get glimpses of her life with Theo, her husband. He’s always “working”, and when Sophie enters the dressing room to change into robes for court, other women look at her with pity. This reader spotted Theo as a cheat right off – after all, if someone cheats on their partner to be with you, they will most certainnly cheat on you to be with someone else. Sophie, though, waves it all away, even after finding a lipstick in Theo’s car on the floorboard. Of course he has an easy excuse for it, as he does every time she is passively questioning him about it. Ultimately, and thankfully, she finally gets a clue and kicks him to the curb – she leaves.

But, since she’s broke, and because she thinks this dude somehow means it when he says they should try again, she moves back into the house. She thinks she hears an argument, but is sleepy and ignores it. Then she wakes up, tells Theo there’s someone in the house, but of course he does not get up. She goes downstairs and the escaped, violent rapist is there to take her away. The fight scene there is pretty good, and it’s nice that she offs the bad guy – no thanks to Theo, who hid in the bathroom and dialed 999 (the British version of 911).

Sophie discovers she’s pregnant, but leaves Theo again anyway (hooray!). Lydia (remember her? The Russian wife of the buyer f the paper?) tells Sophie to come with her to Russia to look into the disappearance of her uncle Kiril. She does, and then, mystery solved by her memory of the time being teased out, she returns to London and decides she’s home. Presumably, she goes about her business from that moment forward.

The writing is fine, and the descriptions of he British legal system are interesting. There’s a lot of editorializing by the authors via Sophie about it. It’s an okay book – not great, but not unreadable.

I’d have liked it better had there been one story picked of these versus cramming three into it. Alas, that was not the case, and alas, this one didn’t do it for me. Your mileage may vary.

Two stars of five. Thanks to NetGalley and RedDoor Press for the reading copy.

Reading and reviews

Before She Was Helen – review

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Solid four stars out of five. Warning: there is discussion of rape and a serial rapist, although not graphic.

Clemmie – or, as her neighbors know her, Helen – lives in a sleepy, sort-of retirement community called Sun City. Her next door neighbor Dom texts her every morning to let her know he’s ok. Except today: no text.

Clemmie has a key to Dom’s place – in case of emergency, and something her friends and neighbors do not know. She heads next door into Dom’s place, calling out for him. She doesn’t find him, but she does find a door in the garage that leads to the other attached villa, presumably owned by neighbors who are rarely seen.

Telling herself that she’s just checking for Dom, she enters the third (very empty, almost unlived-in) villa and sees a glass dragon sculpture that she thinks is so beautiful that she takes a picture and texts it to her nephew.

So begins Before She Was Helen, a character-driven mystery set in a limited community area.

Her text puts into a motion a grand mystery: the creator of the dragon is hunting for money stolen from him and tracks down Clemmie/Helen, Dom is missing, no one knows much of anything about the ghost neighbors, Clemmie’s friend Joyce is kicking out her boyfriend (who has been taking money from her checking account in bits and pieces), and all the other neighbors join in the fun when a body is found in Dom’s golf cart, in his garage.

There’s another story as well: Clemmie’s life before she became Helen, as the title suggests, in the 50s. It involves Clemmie being stalked and raped repeatedly by a man, her becoming pregnant tanks to her rapist, and giving up the child to an adoptive couple. When she moves from place to place, trying to escape him, he always finds where she is living and shows up. At one point, he rapes her roommate when he turns up but doesn’t find Clemmie. The rapist is later found dead. The case went cold in the past, and in the present, Clemmie’s nephew texts her that the case is being reopened, adding another worry to her pile.

The book moves fairly seamlessly between the present and the past, both eras containing complex mysteries to be solved: in the present, who among Clemmie’s neighbors are involved in drugs/dealing, and who killed the young man found in Dom’s garage? In the past, how did Clemmie finally escape, and who killed the stalker/rapist?

While none of the characters are very deeply presented beyond Clemmie, I still found it an enjoyable read and was wondering how all the pieces would be tied together, or indeed, if they could be. Answer: yes, they could be, and were.

As noted, this is a character-driven novel: there are no big action sequences or gory scenes beyond some blood in a knife fight that involves the artist and one of Clemmie’s neighbors. If you are looking or gunfights and foot (or golf cart) chases, you won’t find that here. But if you’re looking for a good read of how one woman reinvented herself and how she manages to get through the webs small town communities can weave, this is the book for you.

Thanks to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for the advance reading copy.

Reading and reviews

A Matter of Will – book review

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Thanks to NetGalley and Thomas&Mercer for the electronic advance copy. This book is slated for release this summer.

Before I go in, a side note: this is an uncorrected proof. I’m not sure if whoever edits these titles reads the feedback, but please, for the love of anything you hold holy, correct the instances of “shelf company” to “shell company”. I’ve never read anything else by this author, so have no comparisons to earlier works of his.

Will Matthews is a not-so-successful broker (or “wealth manager”) at a finance company – so unsuccessful that he gets dumped on by his boss on an almost daily basis and worries he will be fired at any moment. Enter Sam and Eve, who he meets at a hockey game. Before he knows what has hit him, Sam is sweeping Will off his feet, taking him to lavish dinners, tuxedo-required parties, and parking tens of millions of dollars with him for investing. He basically buys Will a ten million dollar apartment, and makes him sign off as a director of or participant in various shell companies.

Meanwhile, Gwen is a young attorney added to the team defending a Hollywood star, who has allegedly killed his wife. Will and Gwen meet up via a dating app, have a dinner, and another date. They wind up as a couple – it’s true love for both of them.

There’s no real way to go through the rest without spoilers, so I’ll leave it at: everything is not as it seems, and soon after that, Will and Gwen have to start thinking about their very survival, both professionally and personally.

The good: it’s easy enough to read. The author doesn’t wander off into incomprehensible jargon associated with his own profession (law) when some courtroom/lawyer scenes come up. Will is given a fairly good backstory. There’s some infodumping, given as dialogue instead of a wall of text.

The bad: I’m sorry to say I found it to be a weird mashup of The Firm and Wall Street and When Harry Met Sally. Will is so naive as to be implausible, and apparently it doesn’t sound any alarms to him that some random guy he meets wants to invest a fortune with him. .Even worse, the first 50% of the book is very dull throughout this. Not once does Will question anything, and the first half is just Will and Gwen going about their respective businesses.. It looks like the author couldn’t decide on what kind of book it should be, so included everything, and that swamped the entire book. Also: using the actual John Yoo in this? Not good.

The remainder of the book involves some murders, a bit of cat and mouse, and asks the reader to believe that the kingpin of a gigantic criminal organization would tell even the new nominal leader of it about plans, the evidence being held over their head, or allow that person to remain alive, knowing that person is not all in and is hesitant about roping in another young broker, among other things. We then get swept over once more to the legal bit playing out on Gwen’s side, which does nothing for the story. She, too, winds up appearing to be a tad too naive, and the ending is simply far too convenient, wrapping up all the details.

If this book were by an as yet unpublished author, and they submitted it as it is, that author would remain unpublished. It would be fine as a plane or beach read, but I would not recommend it.