Review: Snared by Jennifer Estep

Snared is the 16th installment in the elemental assassin series by Jennifer Estep.

Gin Blanco has her hands busy. If it's not tracking down members of The Circle and trying to find out more about it and them, then it is acting on redeemed favors chasing down a missing girl on the mean streets of Ashland.

The first member of The Circle that Gin is pursuing is Damian Rivera. He is the most accessible member she has found thus far. He is a drunk, generally reprehensible, and appears to have little security. Gin sneaks onto his property to see what she can learn. His head of security seems to be more of a threat than Damian. Bruce Porter is for a minimum very alert.

The next day, Jade, a minor boss in Ashland, comes to Gin to collect on her promise of a favor. Since Gin considers Jade a friend, the favor is freely given. One of Jade's girls is missing.

In the course of the investigation, Gin becomes aware of the fact that there appears to be a killer on the loose in Ashland. But there is something different about this one. And the hunter becomes the prey.

The book is well written. The characters are like old friends. There is enough backstory given to enjoy the book, but it would be better if the reader was already familiar with the main characters. I liked that what was revealed in the book as it seemed to give Gin more depth as well as her nemesis, Hugh Tucker.

It's a good mystery, well plotted. I had my suspicions as to who the killer was, but there was a nice little twist involved.

Overall, I give this book 4 out of 5 stars. It's well worth the read. And it's better if you've been reading the series. The series has lasted to 16 installments and Jennifer Estep still manages to keep Gin and her friends fresh.

Snared became available April 25, 2017 from Pocket Books.

Disclaimer: I received an arc of this book via NetGalley. This review includes my own honest opinions and is given freely.

Waiting on Wednesday #185: The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman

"Waiting on Wednesday" is a weekly event which had been hosted by Jill over at Breaking the Spine where we spotlight upcoming releases we are eagerly anticipating. I'm now linking up with "Can't Wait Wednesday" hosted over at Wishful Endings.

Synopsis from Goodreads:

From beloved author Alice Hoffman comes the spellbinding prequel to her bestseller, Practical Magic.

Find your magic.

For the Owens family, love is a curse that began in 1620, when Maria Owens was charged with witchery for loving the wrong man.

Hundreds of years later, in New York City at the cusp of the sixties, when the whole world is about to change, Susanna Owens knows that her three children are dangerously unique. Difficult Franny, with skin as pale as milk and blood red hair, shy and beautiful Jet, who can read other people’s thoughts, and charismatic Vincent, who began looking for trouble on the day he could walk.

From the start, Susanna sets down rules for her children: No walking in the moonlight, no red shoes, no wearing black, no cats, no crows, no candles, no books about magic. And most importantly, never, ever, fall in love. But when her children visit their Aunt Isabelle, in the small Massachusetts town where the Owens family has been blamed for everything that has ever gone wrong, they uncover family secrets and begin to understand the truth of who they are. Back in New York City, each begins a risky journey as they try to escape the family curse.

The Owens children cannot escape love even if they try, just as they cannot escape the pains of the human heart. The two beautiful sisters will grow up to be the revered, and sometimes feared, aunts in Practical Magic, while Vincent, their beloved brother, will leave an unexpected legacy. Thrilling and exquisite, real and fantastical, The Rules of Magic is a story about the power of love reminding us that the only remedy for being human is to be true to yourself.

Why am I waiting on this one? It's the prequel to Practical Magic. And it's an Alice Hoffman book. I loved the aunts in Practical Magic. I look forward to reading what lead up to them living their lives the way they do in that book. The Rules of Magic is due out October 10, 2017 from Simon and Schuster.

What book are you waiting on this week? Share it or a link in the comments so we can check it out and maybe add it to our TBR lists. Thanks for coming by and Happy Reading!

Review: The Librarians and the Mother Goose Chase by Greg Cox

No sooner have the Librarians returned from their most recent adventure than the main clippings book and their individual books give off alerts. There are 3 large blind rodents in one woman's kitchen. A woman in England wakes up inside a giant pumpkin and must fight her way out. And a man atop a cherry picker trimming trees is blown out of it by a freak wind and lands on a trampoline in a neighboring back yard.

It isn't long before the Librarians reach the conclusion that all of the alerts are related to Mother Goose Rhymes. Jenkins laments that the Mother Goose Treaty must have somehow been broken. The original book was divided into 3 parts - one part for each branch of the family to diffuse its power. Now someone is seeking to reassemble the book and possibly end the world as we know it. With Flynn missing, it's up to Baird, Cassandra, Ezekiel, and Stone, with Jenkins support, to put things to rights once again.

The Librarians and the Mother Goose Chase by Greg Cox is the second book in The Librarians series. The adventures continue on the page in the same way they would in the television series. This makes an excellent television tie-in book. The characters are true to themselves. Events are similar to what you would expect from watching the television show.

The mystery is broken into 4 parts. Each has its own twists and turns based on Mother Goose rhymes. Still, there is an overall arc that brings the mysteries together. All parts must be solved before there will be peace again.

There are 4 points of view- one for each of the Librarians and Baird. It's not hard to follow as each section is clearly labeled at the beginning as to who will be relating the story.

It is readable without being familiar with the series. There is sufficient backstory given. However, you will enjoy it more if you know the characters and their quirks already.

I give this book 4 out of 5 stars. It's a very readable mystery. I enjoyed the Mother Goose rhyme background to it as I enjoy other retellings and things relating to fairy tales and the like. And it is a good tie-in for the television series. I recommend it most for people who enjoy the series. Others would like it, but perhaps not quite as much.

The Librarians and the Mother Goose Chase by Greg Cox is due out April 25, 2017 from Tor Books.

Disclaimer: I received an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Waiting on Wednesday #184: Bibliomysteries edited by Otto Penzler

"Waiting on Wednesday" is a weekly event which had been hosted by Jill over at Breaking the Spine where we spotlight upcoming releases we are eagerly anticipating. I'm now linking up with "Can't Wait Wednesday" hosted over at Wishful Endings.

Synopsis from Goodreads:
If you open your dictionary, you will discover that there is no such word as “bibliomystery.” However, most mystery readers know that the word refers to a mystery story that involves the world of books: a bookshop, a rare volume, a library, a collector, or a bookseller.

The stories in this unique collection were commissioned by the Mysterious Bookshop. They were written by some of the mystery genre’s most distinguished authors. Tough guys like Ken Bruen, Reed Farrel Coleman, Loren D. Estleman, and Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins. Bestsellers like Nelson DeMille, Anne Perry, and Jeffery Deaver. Edgar winners such as C. J. Box, Thomas H. Cook, and Laura Lippman.

Here you will discover Sigmund Freud dealing with an unwelcome visitor; Columbo confronting a murderous bookseller; a Mexican cartel kingpin with a fatal weakness for rare books; and deadly secrets deep in the London Library; plus books with hidden messages, beguiling booksellers, crafty collectors, and a magical library that is guaranteed to enchant you. The stories have been published in seven languages—one has sold more than 250,000 copies as an e-book (“The Book Case” by Nelson DeMille)—and another won the Edgar Allan Poe Award as the Best Short Story of the Year (“The Caxton Lending Library and Book Depository” by John Connolly).

Who knew literature could be so lethal! 

Why am I waiting on this one? It's another book-themed collection of short stories. This time instead of being only about libraries and librarians like Paula Guran's collection Ex Libris I recently featured, the stories are all about the world of books in general: bookstores, books, libraries, collectors or booksellers. I love stories about books, bookstores, and libraries. And the editor has won awards in the field of mystery books. Bibliomysteries is due out August 8, 2017 from Pegasus Books. It was previously published in a book club edition in 2013.

What book are you waiting on this week? Share it or a link in the comments so we can check it out and maybe add it to our TBR lists. Thanks for coming by and Happy Reading!

Teaser Tuesday: Snared by Jennifer Estep

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by The Purplebooker.
Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title and author so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

"Be careful, darling," Jo-Jo murmured. "I'm seeing storm clouds ahead for you. Some very dark, nasty ones. Swirling around and around, trying to consume you, trying to drown out all your light..."

~56% through on my Kindle

Snared is #16 in the Elemental Assassin series by Jennifer Estep. It's due out April 25, 2017 from Pocket Books.

What's your teaser this week? Share it or a link in the comments. Are you enjoying your book? Let us know! Happy Reading!

Disclaimer: The quotation comes from an ARC of the book and may appear differently in the final copy.

Waiting on Wednesday #183: Indigo (a novel) by Charlaine Harris, Christopher Golden and more

"Waiting on Wednesday" is a weekly event which had been hosted by Jill over at Breaking the Spine where we spotlight upcoming releases we are eagerly anticipating. I'm now linking up with "Can't Wait Wednesday" hosted over at Wishful Endings.

Synopsis from Goodreads:

Investigative reporter Nora Hesper spends her nights cloaked in shadows. As Indigo, she's become an urban myth, a brutal vigilante who can forge darkness into weapons and travel across the city by slipping from one patch of shadow to another. Her primary focus both as Nora and as Indigo has become a murderous criminal cult called the Children of Phonos. Children are being murdered in New York, and Nora is determined to make it stop, even if that means Indigo must eliminate every member. But in the aftermath of a bloody battle, a dying cultist makes claims that cause Indigo to question her own origin and memories.

Nora's parents were killed when she was nineteen years old. She took the life insurance money and went off to explore the world, leading to her becoming a student of meditation and strange magic in a mountaintop monastery in Nepal...a history that many would realize sounds suspiciously like the origins of several comic book characters. As Nora starts to pick apart her memory, it begins to unravel. Her parents are dead, but the rest is a series of lies. Where did she get the power inside her?

In a brilliant collaboration by New York Times and critically acclaimed coauthors Charlaine Harris, Christopher Golden, Kelley Armstrong, Jonathan Maberry, Kat Richardson, Seanan McGuire, Tim Lebbon, Cherie Priest, James Moore, and Mark Morris join forces to bring you a crime-solving novel like you've never read before.

Why am I waiting on this one? I'm curious to see how they pull this off with so many co-authors. And it has an interesting plot line. Sounds like it leans toward a mix of mystery and urban fantasy which I enjoy. It's due out June 20, 2017 from St. Martin's Press.

What book are you waiting on this week? Share it or a link in the comments so we can check it out and maybe add it to our TBR lists. Thanks for coming by and Happy Reading!

Teaser Tuesday: You Are Here by Jenny Lawson

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by The Purplebooker.
Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title and author so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I don't believe in radical anything. I suspect I'm too lazy to be radical. I could possibly get behind radical ambivalence. Maybe.

~p. 108

You Are Here by Jenny Lawson was published March 7, 2017 from Flatiron Books. It's sort of a nonfiction, self-help, coloring book.

What's your teaser this week? Share it or a link in the comments. Are you enjoying your book? Let us know! Happy Reading!

Review: Redder than Blood by Tanith Lee

Redder than Blood is a collection of short stories that are retellings of fairy tales. From Snow White to Cinderella to Beauty and the Beast and more, the tales in Redder than Blood are often dark and always with a twist. Most of the stories are sci-fi or fantasy, but there are a few that could be considered general fiction, horror, or straight up fairy tale.

The quality of the writing is good. The stories themselves are well written. Many of them have been published before. I can't say I liked each and every story, but I liked more of them than I disliked. There were a few that felt overly long, like the retelling of Swan Lake. My favorite is the last one in the book, a retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. There was one story that is ostensibly a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but has elements of Bluebeard in it as well. There is a note at the end that pairs the stories with the original they are derived from.

Some of the stories would be trigger inducing for some people because they have issues in them such as child abuse. Remember though the original tales these are drawn from often had the dark and violent as well. They were not Disney stories. There weren't always happy endings and what happened along the way wasn't always pleasant. That pretty much sums up the stories in this collection.

I give it 4 stars out of 5. The writing is good quality and there is a good variety to the tales. I didn't like all of them, but I liked enough of them to give the anthology a healthy thumbs up. Redder than Blood was published April 4, 2017 from DAW.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

Review: Grendel's Guide to Love and War by A.E. Kaplan

Grendel's Guide to Love and War is a clever tale loosely based on Beowulf. It's told from the perspective of a young man named Tom Grendel. He and his friends go in against Rex Rothgar and Wolf who are throwing crazy loud parties in the house next door.

It's a neighborhood with mostly senior citizens for occupants. Grendel and his family are the exceptions to the rule until Ellen Rothgar moves in next door with her two children, Rex and Willow. Now the mom is away and the mice will play. Rex starts throwing raucous parties. Grendel's father is a formerly deployed soldier with PTSD. The loud sounds are a trigger for him. Grendel wants to do the best he can to stop this from happening. His father goes on a trip down to Florida for his job and Grendel gets to work.

I really enjoyed the characters in this story, especially Tom and his friend Ed, and his sister Zipora. Willow was nice, but unreliable. Tom needed the help of his best friend and his sister in his efforts to vanquish the Rothgar tumult.

There are secondary plots. One involves Tom's relationship with the senior citizens in the neighborhood. The other secondary plots are romance related. I enjoyed reading about Tom's efforts to take down and preserve the stories of the elders on his street. The romance was nice too. Just a touch of it, not too much.

The ending has a twist to it that works quite well. Mrs. Werm is definitely a formidable character with her gun tucked into her house dress and her eye patch. I loved Mrs. Lee who along with the other ladies on the street tend to mother Tom.

I enjoyed the language in the book too. There are images such as the hot Virginia air being so thick with humidity that you swim through the air more than anything else. And there was a comparison of the human mind as a "veritable turducken of unknowability." There were just so many good lines in the book. Some of them made me laugh or smile. Some just had a ring of truth to them.

In the author's note, A.E. Kaplan explains the source of her inspiration for the book and how it relates to the tale of Beowulf. It's worth reading.

I give this book 4 stars out of 5. It's well written and the characters are mostly enjoyable. The ones who aren't, you aren't supposed to like anyway (think Rex and Wolf).

Grendel's Guide to Love and War is expected to be published April 18, 2017 by Knopf Books for Young Readers.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion. Any quotes are from the ARC and subject to possible change in the final edition.

Waiting on Wednesday #182: Ex Libris ed. Paula Guran

"Waiting on Wednesday" is a weekly event which had been hosted by Jill over at Breaking the Spine where we spotlight upcoming releases we are eagerly anticipating. I'm now linking up with "Can't Wait Wednesday" hosted over at Wishful Endings.

Synopsis from Goodreads:

Portals to all the knowledge in the world, libraries are also created universes of a multitude of imaginations. Librarians guide us to enlightenment as well as serving as the captains, mages, and gatekeepers who open the doors to delight, speculation, wonder, and terror. Both inspire writers of speculative fiction to pen wonderful tales woven around them. This captivating compilation of science fiction and fantasy short fiction showcases stories of librarians-mysterious curators, heroic bibliognosts, arcane archivists, catalogers of very special collections- and libraries-repositories of arcane wisdom, storehouses of signals from other galaxies, bastions of culture, the last outposts of civilization in a post-apocalyptic world . . . grand adventures and small sagas of the magical places we call libraries and the wizards who staff them! 

Why am I waiting on this one? I love books about libraries and librarians. I worked in a library. A library, pretty much any library, has always been one of my most favorite places in the world. This looks like a good collection of short stories. Paula Guran is an excellent editor.

What book are you waiting on this week? Share it or a link in the comments so we can check it out and maybe add it to our TBR lists. Thanks for coming by and Happy Reading!

Teaser Tuesday: Grendel's Guide to Love and War by A.E. Kaplan

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by The Purplebooker.
Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title and author so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

It was mid-July in Virginia, and in mid-July in Virginia everything is sort of damp and disgusting. The air. The grass. My sweat-coated body. You didn't walk through the air so much as swim through it.

~ 2% through on my Kindle

Actually, that's pretty much true for much, if not all, of the south.

What's your teaser this week? Share it or a link in the comments. Are you enjoying your book? Let us know! Happy Reading!

Disclaimer: The quotations come from an ARC of the book and may appear differently in the final copy. The expected publication date is April 18, 2017 from Knopf Books for Young Readers.

Review: Southern Fried by Tonya Kappes

Southern Fried is the second book in the Kenni Lowry mystery series published by Henery Press. Kenni is a Sheriff in a small town. Her grandfather, and former Sheriff, has come back as a ghost to help her out in policing the town of Cottonwood, Kentucky. She has the help of her new deputy, Finn Vincent, as well.

When one of the local residents is found facedown in a greenhouse, Kenni and her deputy are called to the scene. The body has strange marks on its ankles that correspond to old electrical fencing. And he 's barefoot and his feet are clean. He didn't walk his ownself into that greenhouse. Someone deposited him there.

In spite of it being a small town, there are several suspects and motives to choose from. Finn seeks enlightenment at the local watering hole while Kenni attends a Euchre game where the gossip is hot. Small town investigating seems a little casual, but just right.

The characters in this mystery are interesting and quirky. There's the hard of hearing dispatcher, the feisty florist, and the devastatingly handsome new deputy from Chicago to name a few. Kenni's ghostly Poppa plays the role of a guide and co-investigator, but I think most of the investigation is done smartly by Kenni and Finn.

It has a good pace to it. And it has a good sense of humor. I love the attitude the town has about her dog. If people see him out and about, sometimes they just collect him in their car or truck and drop him back off at the sheriff's office. And there is an undercurrent of romance as Kenni fights her attraction to Finn.

It's a satisfying mystery. It has its twists. And there are surprises at the reveal.

Overall I give this mystery 4 out of  5 stars. If you like small town, southern mysteries,  you will enjoy this one. And to paraphrase Henery Press: if you have enjoyed one of the other mysteries put out by Henery Press, you will most likely enjoy this one as well.

Southern Fried is expected out April 4, 2017.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.