Books: cure for what ails me

Since yesterday’s hardware shenanigans have settled down, howsabout another book roundup, peeps?

Purchased in a slew of buying from B&N, electronically:

• Trick of the Mind and A Spider on the Stairs, by Cassandra Chan. Mystery. These are Books 3 and 4 of her Gibbons-Bethancourt series, which I am very much enjoying; I plowed through library checkout copies of Books 1 and 2 last weekend and went ahead and got these in ebook form. I’d already had a copy of Book 3 bought as a cheap hardback but I wanted to read it on the nook since it was available.
• Bond With Me, by Anne Marsh. Paranormal romance, probably. It’s this week’s Friday freebie from B&N, and I grabbed it since what the hey, free book.
• The Pretender’s Crown, by C.E. Murphy. Fantasy, the Book 2 to go with the most excellent The Queen’s Bastard. Already own a paper copy of this but this is for reading on the nook!
• Daughter of the Forest, by Juliet Marilier. Fantasy. Re-buy of a book previously owned in print.
• Halting State, by Charles Stross. SF. Re-buy of a book previously owned in print.
• Acacia, by David Anthony Durham. Epic fantasy. Re-buy of a book previously owned in print, specifically because it’s a big brick of a book and those are WAY easier to read for me on the nook these days.
• Feast of Souls, by C.S. Friedman. Fantasy. Re-buy of a book previously owned in print.
• The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. YA SF. Because everybody on the planet but me has apparently read this, and right now B&N has the ebook marked down to five bucks.
• Emissaries from the Dead, by Adam-Troy Castro. SF. Re-buy of a book previously owned in print.

This brings me to 21 for the year!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Book Log #83: Pearl Cove, by Elizabeth Lowell

Note: This is a late review from my 2010 book log, posting as I’m trying to get caught up. The 2011 book log will commence once the 2010 reviews are up to date!

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The third of Elizabeth Lowell’s Donovan books, Pearl Cove, is perhaps one of the earliest Lowells that levels up a bit for me in general quality of plot and character development. It’s still formulaic–I haven’t met a Lowell suspense novel that isn’t, even if it’s a formula I happen to enjoy. But this one at least does a better job than others.

This time around we have the focus on Archer Donovan, the oldest of the Donovan brothers and the one who’s generally in charge of everything the younger generation of the family does. He’s a former international operative, with the obligatory unspecific hints about Awful Things He Did When He Was Younger, and he’s got the suitably jaded outlook on life to go with it. And, unsurprisingly, a portion of his Awful Background(TM) is plot-relevant, for it turns out he’s got sordid backstory with his illegitimate half-brother–a bitter, crippled man named Len McGarry. Who, it turns out, has just died under mysterious circumstances. And Archer learns this from Len’s widow Hannah–who, it turns out, is the obligatory Only Woman Archer Has Ever Loved(TM).

Naturally, Archer must hightail it down to Australia to help Hannah find out who murdered her husband, and what happened to the priceless necklace of black pearls he’d been assembling.

I quite enjoyed the “solve the murder mystery” aspect of this story, and the chemistry between Archer and Hannah was suitably edgy and compelling, even given the gyrations Hannah’s backstory goes through to get her into a position of being a widow yet still more or less sexually innocent. The only part of their interaction I didn’t enjoy was the Big Misunderstanding trope rearing its head, since a good chunk of Hannah’s early interactions with Archer are her assuming that he’s just as much of an asshole as her dead husband was, without any particular justification at all. Once they get past the Big Misunderstanding, though, it’s fun to see the Donovans reacting to their brother finally being in love, and all of them coming together to help him and Hannah ultimately solve the crime. Three stars.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Ladies and gentlemen, Draft Five is a WRAP

I have just finished my word count reduction review of Chapter 24, the final chapter of Lament of the Dove. Y’all may recall that I’d already yoinked out a huge number of words from this chapter taking out Nine-Fingered Rab’s final scene, now targeted for the beginning of Shadow of the Rook. I did however want to make one last pass through it just to see if there were any other words I could lose.

Now that that is done, I can commence Draft Six. This will be the pass through which I will implement the bigger requested changes from both Carina’s editor and the beta readers who’ve given me the best feedback. I’m not going to go into detail on the planned changes here for purposes of avoiding spoiling anybody.

Suffice to say, instead, that Draft Five’s final word count clocks in at 104,504 words, some of which will come back as I add in new content for Draft Six. And Draft Six begins NOW.

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.