Book Reviews

Winter Games is a thriller, a “gripping tale of military cover-ups and international crime,” according to the description on the back cover. The novel blurs the edges between science fiction and thriller with the use of a female, and very helpful, robot named Sarah who comes to the aid of the human protagonist, Tim Sutton.

I read a lot of thrillers and mysteries written by such authors as James Lee Burke, Val McDermid, Michael Connelly, Craig Johnson, and others, so I was looking forward to reading Winter Games. I have to confess to not being gripped.

The back-cover plot […]

Sam Moffie’s No Mad (get it?) is (unfortunately, because I really was ready to like this novel) a perfect example of why self-published books are generally given a bad rap. This book is a mess. I suppose it could be left at that and No Mad could just be tossed onto the pile of the myriad other self-published tomes already littering the internet, but by the same token, it can also be said that having a strictly bad review on a site such as this one can, if nothing else, quiet any critics who seem to believe that self-published material […]

One Fine Season is a deeply felt novel of faith and the afterlife. And baseball.

The readers who will enjoy this book most may well be those who liked The Shack by William P. Young. Like that extremely popular novel, One Fine Season features lengthy conversations about religion, God, the universe, and spirituality. And baseball. Lots of baseball. Michael Sheehan has obviously given much thought to the nature of things, and he knows and loves baseball. So on several levels, the novel has a great deal going for it.

In order not to completely give away the story, I’ll quote […]

After completing an internship at the famous music magazine Record Shelves (read Rolling Stone), and scandalizing conservatives by running a story about youth masturbation rates in a Wyoming college newspaper, twenty-something wannabe rock journalist Ethan Ames was on track for greater things. Resisting his father’s wish that he would one day takeover from him as editor of Laramie’s Daily Democrat, Ethan instead gave in to his wanderlust. But life as a freelance rock journalist hasn’t exactly panned out. After months without work, he’s taken a job editing copy for a minor San Diego daily. He followed his girlfriend, […]

It’s hard to know where to start with a book like Place. I enjoyed it, that much is certain. It brought me to tears a couple times, that’s certain too. But what is it about? There are clearly a few levels that this book can be read at, and that makes it tricky to pin down.

On the face of it, Place is the story of two fairly responsible and well-to-do adults—one of whom just happens to have a penchant for disappearing, literally, for a few seconds at a time—trying to find more happiness together than they experienced with […]

The Travels of Annie T. Hastings purports to be the true-life journals of the editor’s mother. Without any background information other than what is offered within the book itself, one must take this claim at face-value, I suppose. Which may be its Achilles heel. More on that in a moment.

The concept is definitely intriguing: a man finds his mother’s old journals after she passes away, then discovers that she has lived quite the adventure during her later years. The story goes that Ms. Hastings decided to embark on a road-trip with her dog from west coast to east in […]

I’m a great fan of addiction memoirs.  I’ve read criticism of addiction memoirs beginning with the refrain, “Oh, great another…”  But while it’s true that addicts’ stories overlap, and even the life of one addict is repeating the same behavior over and over again, these narratives are often compelling.  The main reason is honesty.  One of the things missing from much fiction and narrative memoirs is someone willing to make themselves look bad – to reveal a darker side of their personality.  By design, addiction memoirs are written by authors who are more than willing to reveal their faults.  There […]

I don’t like books written in first person, present tense. I don’t like stories told from the point of view of a mentally ill person. So I don’t know why I offered to review Craig Lancaster’s debut novel, Six-Hundred Hours of a Life.

I’m very glad I did, though, because 600 Hours is a very good book. It just goes to show that even a reviewer can work through a prejudice, and a good read can conquer a pre-conceived notion of what we like or dislike.

600 Hours is witty, heart-warming, and satisfying.

The main character, Edward Stanton, is […]