en-US Tue, 22 Apr 2025 14:27:37 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg ReadStatus9340270107 Tue, 22 Apr 2025 14:27:37 -0700 /review/show/7510375246 Matt is currently reading The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris by Evie Woods
]]> Review7479956869 Mon, 21 Apr 2025 13:27:11 -0700 /review/show/7479956869 Matt gave 3 stars to Falls to Pieces (Kindle Edition) by Douglas Corleone
The Dark Side of Paradise

A fugitive mother and daughter going underground in the exotic extreme of Hana, Maui suddenly find their lives are turning upside down yet again, after escaping from a wealthy, obsessive, abusive husband in Bridgeport, CT.

An unexpected disappearance of a local soon-to-be-husband with foul play suspected. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Sounds promising at the outset with fast-paced action. But before long Douglas Corleone’s 2025 thriller “Falls to Pieces� turns shrill with the paranoid tone of the mother, Kati Dawes, narrative as the primary storyteller. Interspersed with brief counter perspectives from Zoe, her teenage daughter, creating “what’s going on here?� suspense.

Much running around and much slipping back and forth between the current predicaments and back stories just in time to sort of explain why life seems to keep going sideways for Kati and Zoe. However, the relentless yo-yo between “Am I crazy� actions and persistent “How did I get here� explanations get wearisome and seem to cover the same ground confusingly at times.

And then there’s the shark-jumping ending that may leave some wondering if these characters are likable and sympathetic.

Having been to Maui and some of the locations described as well as living at one point near Bridgeport, I can say the author does a nice job with describing the environment and lifestyles. His postscript support for battered women is commendable but not enough to justify how this story is developed and ends.
]]> Review7487646234 Mon, 14 Apr 2025 06:23:07 -0700 /review/show/7487646234 Matt gave 3 stars to The Bloodletter's Daughter (Paperback) by Linda Lafferty
Early Twilight of the Habsburg Monarchy

A florid melodrama set against an interesting historical period and backdrop.

While Shakespeare was penning some of his great tragedies in 1607-1608, another murky drama with eerily familiar themes was unfolding within the lands of Bohemia.

Emperor Rudolf II of the Hapsburgs was essentially withdrawing from his responsibilities to manage the diverse states of modern-day Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania � all under attack from the ever-expanding Ottoman Empire. Like a future emperor, Czar Nicholas II, he was more focused on endowing his art and architecture legacy than the politics of nation-building.

His preferred heir, a bastard son named Don Julius, clearly had some problems with unleashed self-indulgence for wine, women, maybe song but definitely violence.

Linda Lafferty’s 2012 blended historical fiction, “The Bloodletter’s Daughter: A Novel of Old Bohemia", presents the story of Marketa Pichlerova, a fetching teenage bath house beauty in Cesky Krumlov, a lovely (today) small town in the southern Czech Republic, and her involvement with the Don Julius, who has been confined by his father to its thirteenth century castle.

Lafferty takes advantage of the mystery surrounding Don Julius� eccentric behavior leading to his death in 1609 as well as liberties with the fate of Marketa to create her story.

While the location details are reasonably authentic and the blend of historical beliefs and behaviors believable for the time period, the plot development is slow and moves like a gothic romance novel. That may have been the author’s intention but it drags.

Maybe a movie version can improve the pace but, even though based on real people and events. the storyline seems more designed for a 1950s Cinerama production. ]]> ReadStatus9296355584 Fri, 11 Apr 2025 05:16:37 -0700 /review/show/7479956869 Matt is currently reading Falls to Pieces by Douglas Corleone
]]> ReadStatus9296353844 Fri, 11 Apr 2025 05:15:49 -0700 /review/show/6681823673 Matt started reading The Last Thing to Burn by Will Dean
]]> ReadStatus9222248596 Sun, 23 Mar 2025 12:04:40 -0700 /review/show/7428189521 Matt wants to read Any Human Heart by William Boyd
]]> Review7069006695 Sun, 23 Mar 2025 06:51:02 -0700 /review/show/7069006695 Matt gave 5 stars to Ordinary Thunderstorms (Kindle Edition) by William Boyd
DIY Witness Protection Program

Imagine: you are being helpful returning papers left behind by someone you casually met in a restaurant and walk in to witness a murder in progress at their private home. And the next thing you know, you are the prime suspect…even though you saw someone else there who did it.

What do you do to protect yourself?

Set in London around the Chelsea Bridge area, William Boyd’s 2010 complex, twisty thriller, “Ordinary Thunderstorms�, steers you through the maze of this scenario for Adam Kindred, a climatologist returning to London for a job interview, who has a chance encounter with Dr. Philip Wang, research and development head for a local pharmaceutical company.

And then, everything for Adam goes sideways. He becomes a man on the run from the police and other sinister people trying to kill him for reasons unknown. He has to go to ground, literally.

With Hitchcockian suspense the author rapidly shifts the tale’s perspectives between the pursued and the pursuers in rapid sequence. Like a chameleon, Adam changes identities, lifestyles, and manages to stay one step ahead. At the same time his pursuit has their own separate shadowy motives for chasing the MacGuffin, a breakthrough pharmaceutical formula.

Rivaling Charles Dickens, Boyd provides remarkable skill and nuanced detail about different lives that Adam encounters and adapts to on his personal odyssey as well as the intricacies and intrigue of modern corporate practices.

If you are looking for an imaginative journey, this is the ticket.
]]> Review7394341169 Tue, 11 Mar 2025 06:23:20 -0700 /review/show/7394341169 Matt gave 5 stars to The Glass Man: A Novel (The Asker Series Book 2) by Anders de la Motte
Into the Gloaming of Nordic Noir

In the hinterlands of Southern Sweden mysterious disappearances of urban explorers, those who visit abandoned industrial sites, and others seem to pass unnoticed until a body is recovered from the chilly shores of Miresjon Lake.

Mystery surrounds this body of water and its isolated Boulder Isle with an abandoned observatory perched over a mining facility founded by since departed Bernard Irving. His son, “Space-Case� Gunnar Irving, claims his founding of the successful AlpaCent Industries with cutting edge medical technology and cryotherapy came to him after a UFO encounter on the island.

Parallel to these developments, Lenore “Leo� Asker and her “off-kilter colleagues at the Department of Lost Souls� (Virgilsson, Rosen, Zafer and Attila) are drawn into a reluctant effort to prove the innocence of her father, Per Asker, an off-the-grid survivalist, of a 16-year-old murder just turned up near his Farm compound.

Meanwhile, Martin Hill, friend and companion to Leo, has been retained to write a vanity history of the Irving family and brought to Astroholm, their family compound with buildings named after constellations, to review their library of materials and interview now 80-year-old Gunnar and other curious members of the extended family.

What could go wrong? Will these parallel paths meet at some near vanishing point?

Once again, Anders de la Motte’s imagination and trim writing style brings us into his world of Nordic thrillers with “The Glass Man�, published originally 2023 in Sweden and to be released 2025 in the United States - sequel to his dazzling 2022 “The Mountain King�.

As with the author’s first work, the back stories, mingled with present events related primarily by Leo and Martin in alternating chapters, builds to a fast-paced, hard-to-put-down chase and revelation.

And that engaging “What if…� twilight between myth and reality.
]]> Review7252034760 Wed, 26 Feb 2025 12:41:33 -0800 /review/show/7252034760 Matt gave 5 stars to James (ebook) by Percival Everett
A Tale of Jim and James

Are there two versions of each of us, perhaps even more? An outward facing one for everyone to see, a personal one familiar to just a few and, then, a complex inner one only "I" know?

Despite the publicity presenting this new work as an alternative narrative for Jim from Mark Twain’s 1884 “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn�, Percival Everett’s 2024 novel, “James� is a very different perspective about pre-Civil War life along the Mississippi. In fact, this work places the characters closer to the War’s 1861 beginning than Twain’s 1830s setting.

From the start you know this is a tale of two personalities within a single being: Jim, the outward-facing Mark Twain character by his manner of speech, and a more literate, better-spoken, thoughtful James deliberately concealed to not arouse suspicion among the white community.

The first third of the book follows the Twain narrative of how Huck and Jim start out on the run and traveling on the Mississippi. When they meet up with two of the Twain’s originals, flim-flam artists the Duke and the Dauphin, the tone and direction changes significantly. It is no longer a boyhood adventure tale.

From then on, Everett trimly depicts a more grim, even scarier, border state environment within which blacks are forced to live and accept as their lot. As a character named Easter sardonically relates to James; ““White People try to tell us that everything will be just fine when we get to heaven. My question is: Will they be there? If so, I might make other arrangements.�

Later, James observes about racial differences: “White people often spent time admiring their survival of one thing or another. I imagined it was because so often they had no need to survive, but only to live.�

And expect to see and read the “n� word many times. Its use cannot be covered over or ignored for the authenticity of this story.

Late in the story there is some ambivalence in the relationship between James and Huck who go separate ways. In contrast to Twain’s ending with Jim having been freed by his former owner’s will, James faces different realities and inner turmoil leaving his path forward clear but hardly settled.

The original Huckleberry Finn story was written for a different time, audience and perspective reflective of Twain’s experiences. Everett’s novel is not a criticism of this earlier work. “James� is really its own adventure story with a point of departure for learning about the experiences of black people under abusive conditions.

And all of us when pushed beyond our comforts, securities and limits we take for granted.

]]> Review7330576264 Mon, 17 Feb 2025 14:07:29 -0800 /review/show/7330576264 Matt gave 4 stars to Luminous (Hardcover) by Silvia Park
A Near State of Transition

“Bionic. Transhuman. Posthuman. The world made a promise to her: death is a problem that can be solved.�

Silvia Park’s 2025 near-future novel, "Luminous�, set in a recently united Korea, imagines a world with multiple stages of personality development existing side-by-side in human, robotic and integrated human-robotic forms. Their lives appear simple but, below the surface, more complex with unusual twists and implications for biological life as we experience it.

After a brief prologue, the story opens with the Seoul Robot Crimes unit investigating the disappearance of a young female robot, Eli. Quickly, the situation moves into a deeper exploration of a society with seemingly traditional crimes that has more dynamic issues: will humans outlast their transitional and post-human forms in a more programmed world?

The storyline follows three groups of people as they come to terms with converging situations:

� Liu Ruije, an older woman who uses a mechanical support vest to aid her declining body and her robotic companion, Yoyo; and a group of younger human companions, Taewon, Wonsuk, Mars and Amelia, exploring the robot cast-off wastelands of earlier models
� Detective Cho Jun, a human member of Robot Crimes, with restored mobility through robotic aides due to a prior accident and whose assignment is to track down Elisha or “Eli, child version of Sakura, the popular “girl next door� robot from Imagine Friends and
� Morgan, Cho’s sister, a personality programmer for Imagine Friends who is launching a new release of robotic companion designs, Future X Children, with Boy X, her design, to be the star of the launch and her own robotic companion, Stephen

Additional shadowy personalities are Cho Yosep, Morgan and Cho’s father, and his deceased partner, Kanemoto Masaaki, founder of Imagine Friends.

Just imagine Barbie, Ken and their many iterations larger, mechanically smooth enough to pass for human forms, including intimate physical contact, and programmed to anticipate their human companions� needs and desires with the devotion of pets.

But are they devoted as they are redesigned with new physical and behavior traits while storing previous learned memories, good and bad, that carry to the next design generation through a visible “luminous� cloud transfer?

And will they ultimately outlast humans and learn to self-program their own future replications?

The story takes time to unfold and can be frustrating to sustain interest due to various diversions and getting familiar with names and local references to places, food, etc. Like a Dickens novel, the plot is dense but a rewarding speculation.

The questions raised were anticipated by Czech science fiction writer, Karel Capek, in his 1920 groundbreaking novel and play, “RUR, Rossum’s� Universal Robots�, introducing the world to the now familiar term, robot. ]]>