Buying yet another bookstore’s worth of books or so

Because apparently a lot of the news in my life just involves buying a boatload of books, it’s time again for What’s New on Anna’s To Read Shelves!

Picked up in ebook form to feed my hungry, hungry Nook (and eventually, I swear, I’ll get around to reading all these too):

• Bellwether, by Connie Willis. SF. Because Fictionwise is having a sale on SF and Mystery this week!
• The Reincarnationist, by M.J. Rose. Mystery. Also because of the sale. I actually already had a freebie ebook copy of this, but it’s an Adobe Digital Editions PDF and not terribly readable on my Nook. So I said screw it, and got a far more readable eReader version. (Also, because M.J. Rose is apparently following me on Twitter. Hi!)
• Blown, The Alibi Club, and The Secret Agent, by Francine Mathews. Mystery/Suspense. Because I’d previously read a lot of her work both under this name and that of Stephanie Barron, and I enjoy her quite a bit.
• A Hint of Wicked and A Touch of Scandal, by Jennifer Haymore. Historical romance. In no small part because the Smart Bitches spread the news this morning that she has been diagnosed with invasive breast cancer, and this is me supporting a fellow survivor by buying her work. It helps quite a bit that from what I saw in the descriptions, I should have fun with these!
• Crocodile on the Sandbank, Curse of the Pharaohs, and Seeing a Large Cat, by Elizabeth Peters! Mystery. This is, of course, me starting to buy ebook forms of all my Amelia Peabodies. Which I will ALSO be keeping in print.
• The Summer of You, by Kate Noble. Historical romance. Highly, highly recommended by the Smart Bitches.
• Hell Fire, by Ann Aguirre. Urban fantasy. Because I dig her work quite a bit.
• A River in the Sky, by Elizabeth Peters! Mystery. This is the very latest Amelia Peabody, which I will be getting around to as soon as I read (drum roll)…
• Changes, by jimbutcher! Urban fantasy. Dresden Files. By which I mean AWESOME.

To go along with that last, I did of course also finally pick up Turn Coat, the previous Dresden, in print. Decided that even though the oversized paperback still annoys me, it will still serve well enough as an archival just-in-case-I-lose-all-my-ebooks copy. In the meantime, I’ll just be reading the ebook!

This, ladies and gentlemen, brings my grand total of acquired books for the year up to 119.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Book Log #21: Naked in Death, by J.D. Robb

This is the very first of the “In Death” series by J.D. Robb, who is of course better known by her other name, Nora Roberts. To this day I remain very fond of this entire series, since it’s among the first that got me into regularly reading romantic suspense, and it’s a good bridge between that and my more preferred genre of SF.

And given Ms. Roberts’ usual mode of writing, this first of the long line of Eve Dallas novels is actually more enjoyable to me for the futuristic worldbuilding than it is for the romance. Don’t get me wrong, Roarke is a very swoonable love interest–but his main function in this plot is to be handsome and mysterious, and to put our heroine, NYPD cop Eve Dallas, through a wringer of OHNOEZ HE IS MY PRIMARY SUSPECT YET I CANNOT RESIST HIS HOTNESS. Compared to how their relationship develops later, Eve and Roarke are really kind of cliched getting out of the gate. On the other hand, it must definitely be said that the way Roarke really gets to Eve emotionally, giving her real coffee, is both a great little worldbuilding detail, since real coffee is rare in this timeframe, and very, very sweet.

But don’t let that stop you from enjoying this book, if you like your romantic suspense with a light dose of SF on the side. The setting is just far enough into the future that we’ve got flying cars (YAY!), droids, interstellar travel as well as super-swift planetary transit, and other technological marvels. What appeals to me just as much are the political and social worldbuilding details, though. In the Eve Dallas universe, prostitution has become legal and those who engage in it are “licensed companions”; the Browncoat in me just has to grin at this. Motherhood is considered a paying career choice, and women who elect to stay home and raise their children are in fact paid salaries as full-time professional mothers, which is awesome.

This early in the series–and this is something I’d forgotten, given how long it had been since I read this one the first time–the setting is rather grittier than you see later on as well. Eve is still primarily a street cop, and she hasn’t gotten her future aide Peabody as of this story. So you see a lot more of her doing legwork and encountering various disreputable characters as she works the case. I really rather miss that from the later books, since it makes this one and the couple that follow stand out better as individual plots.

As for the case itself, it’s a high-profile serial killer case that has Eve running afoul of a U.S. senator as well as Roarke, the richest and most powerful man on the planet. The plot structure won’t surprise anyone familiar with Roberts’ work or really, with romantic suspense cop plots in general. But it’s a fun light read and a great start to a series with impressive longevity indeed. Four stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.