I have reviewed for Amazon.com since 2002 and am currently in the Top 2,000 Reviewers. I have reviews with E-pinions and other on line review sites. I have a blog: So, I read this book… which is a collection of my most recent reviews, many of which are Kindle books. I also write music reviews for Ambient Visions.
Currently I prefer reviewing Science Fiction, Fantasy, Paranormal and alternative historical works. But I have a good grasp of fiction and non-fiction work and can review just about any kind of book. I am not afraid to look something up or verify facts.
I am a displaced New Yorker; lived in NYC for 43 years. I now live in the woods in the Midwest but I have not changed. I am very diverse, enjoy good food, good wine, good friends and good fun. And I have been called “very in your face honest.”
I am a seasoned geek and I work in the IT field. I am proficient in many software platforms and very up to date with technology. And my hobby is ancient and medieval history.
I am a writer. I have published a couple of E-books and enjoy the process. I am currently working on two more books for publication.
I have one husband, 8 cats and many computers.
As I started reading this book, I was struck by two things. One, this book has the look and feel of a James A. Michener novel; broad, sweeping, long, intricate, descriptive and not intended to be gobbled up in a few days. The second was the feeling of Roots in in its themes and content. I was taken back in time to before the black man was taken from Africa as slaves to a new land, through the process of slavery and adaptation and then to the present time. But this is no Roots, because this is not America.[…]
Detective John Ressler is faced with a series of murders that defy logic. The serial killer has an artistic streak; setting his victims in some outlandish poses, painting them, photographing them, dressing them and creating works to enhance their death – and leaving the art at the scene. What is even more bizarre is that some of the crimes appear to be impossible to have set up and executed in the time allotted. When they finally capture the artist, he disappears from the holding cell. Ressler and his partner Holt are stumped.
Awakening – an event that has an intense change on humanity. So much so that it hits a 10 on the Rector scale in human evolution. When humans progressed from “hunting and food gathering tribes” to “agricultural homesteaders” – that was an Awakening. While not occurring overnight, an Awakening can take centuries to complete but the effect is dynamic. There have been three Awakenings so far.
Penelope Spence was a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist in her younger days. But she made a choice – to pursue a home and children over a very promising career. Now the kids are grown […]
This crime drama features two very unique characters: John “Smooth” McGovern, a detective on the police force, and his partner Rita “Cheeks” Goreman. They are the homicide squad and, as in real life, they are faced with budget cuts, piles of paperwork and the fact that they must move on when a case turns up dead ends, because there is always another case. No glamor here, just hard core cop story with all the reality thrown in.
We follow our detectives on three homicide cases: a strange shooting and theft, a dead body in the water with a pocket full […]
I read through the opening pages, called “Before We Get Started” and I had the feeling I was going to be reading a book about a Blues Band from Albany. I wanted to research the material, but the link given to the band was wrong… http://WAlbanyStBlues.com should be https://WAlbanStBluesBand.com. And I am thinking, oh, boy, we need an editor here, stat.
I then started getting into the book itself; the first chapter. I thought, oh my, Hunter S. Thompson’s final work? Or maybe this is his protégé? This is soooo Gonzo Journalism; but the author is no journalist. The author […]
Over the past few weeks I have been concentrating on reading Kindle book files. I say concentrating because the urge to take out a red pencil and slash all the grammar, spelling, punctuation and capitalization errors is overtaking my urge to read. My eyes hurt. The worst ones are, sadly, self-published books. And I understand the issue…it is very hard to edit your own work. Some will tell you it is almost impossible.
But most of these errors are correctable. And it sooooo distracts from the content of the book. It becomes almost impossible to read some passages as you […]
Having reviewed as much non-fiction as I have, you are bound to come across those who have “borrowed” other people’s work and not given them credit for it. It doesn’t happen often in traditionally-published works, but it does happen. As a green reviewer early on, I missed one that was a direct rip-off of another authors work. It was embarrassing, to say the least.
Plagiarism happens in many genres of non-fiction. Older material is out of print or in limited issue and someone thinks no one will notice. These titles can be run through software that checks for plagiarism and […]
I would classify this as a sci-fi thriller. The science fiction genre allows us to go anywhere we want and create anything we can imagine. Mr. Shields has successfully created an alternative earth where animals have been genetically altered to be human while retaining, to various degrees, their animal appearances and nature. Mr. Shields works this throughout the novel, giving them very human appearance and attributes, but never too much!
The story follows Shark and his friends. Shark is a completely believable character. An expert billiard player (read that great-white pool shark) who embarks on an adventure to help his […]