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David Starr, Space Ranger is the first of Isaac Asimov’s Lucky Starr books, originally written for younger readers. David Starr is a young member of the Council of Science, an organization that essentially combines science, government, and law enforcement. When people on Earth begin dying from poisoned food imported from Mars, Starr is sent undercover to investigate what is happening and who might be behind it. Once on Mars, he meets John “Bigman” Jones, a small but very energetic Martian who becomes his friend and companion. I first read this book when I was a young teenager, and I remember enjoying it then. I'm not sure I was aware that it was written by Asimov at the time as it was first published under the name Paul French. Coming back and reading the book again now, I wasn’t sure whether the story would hold up or whether I would simply be remembering how much I enjoyed it at the time. Fortunately, I enjoyed it again. This is definitely an old-fashioned science fiction advent...

Earlier this week, on my blog, I gave a two star rating to a book and complained that it had too much gratuitous sex at the expense of the story. I thought it might be appropriate to follow that up with another book that had more than a decent amount of sex but managed to have a complex (romance) story, showing that it is possible to combine story and explicit sex in a book. I don't typically read romance books but mostly because there are other books I'd rather read first.  In my admittedly rather complicated method of 'what to read next' system, this is what popped up. And, wow ... I really liked this. "Cat" is a confident young woman who loves to skateboard. She's tough and adventurous and she's not looking for anyone or anything to interrupt her life.  She's a graffiti artist when she's not at work as a graphic designer. Her best friend and house-mate is a gay male, Jay, and the two get along fabulously.  She surprises herself then when a m...

Due in large part to my Scandinavian heritage and growing up in Minnesota, I have been fascinated with the story of the Vikings in North America. Most people are familiar with Leif Erikson's voyage to Vinland, but how much farther did Norse influence reach? In American Vikings , Martyn Whittock explores not only what we know about Viking exploration of North America, but also the many theories, legends, and controversies that have grown up around the subject. Whittock begins with the historical evidence surrounding the Norse settlements in Greenland and the archaeological discoveries at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, reminding the us that Viking exploration of the New World is no longer a matter of speculation but an accepted part of history. But even with this knowledge, there is still much debate as to the extent of the Vikings' reach. The book examines runestones, disputed artifacts, medieval sagas, Native American encounters, and the sometimes outlandish claims tha...

This was a new experience in reading for me for a couple of reasons. But first, the story: Blair Huntingdon and Proctor Gamble are detectives with the Rainbow Detective Agency. They argue a lot and they can't seem to agree on most things, but they also can't keep their hands off each other. Yes, they are the rainbow Detective Agency because they are gay partners as well as business partners. Their newest client is Alonzo Albertini - a gorgeous hunk of man. Well, maybe he's a man and maybe not. He claims to be an Italian fairy with magical powers. Not surprisingly, Blair and Proctor can't agree - Proctor thinks the man is a nut but Blair believes him. Their differences could mean disaster as their investigation will take them to interacting with a dark order of magicians, have them in touch with a chalice stolen from the Vatican, and a whole web of magical intrigue and magic. Part of what makes this book a new experience for me is because of the blend of story and sex. I...

John Scalzi has developed a knack for taking an utterly absurd premise, treating it with complete sincerity, and somehow creating a story that is both laugh-out-loud funny and surprisingly heartfelt. Monsters of Ohio continues that tradition. Richland, Ohio, is a small farming community that has seen better days. The town's largest employer is preparing to shut down, private equity has its sights set on what remains, and longtime residents are wondering what comes next. Mike Boyd returns home expecting only to help his family through difficult times, but instead finds himself caught in events that become stranger by the day. It starts with odd happenings involving local livestock before escalating into something that no one—not the townspeople, the authorities, or the readers—could have anticipated. Scalzi embraces the weirdness with enthusiasm, but beneath the bizarre surface lies a story about community, belonging, and deciding what kind of people we choose to be. One of Scalzi...

Cork O'Connor is trying to enjoy his retirement and hopefully teach his grandchildren the joys of spending time in God's Country - the Boundary Waters. But just before a planned trip, two different family members have had a troubling vision involving, they strongly believe, Cork. Adding to the concern is that Cork has been having problems with his heart.  While he's encouraged to stay home for this trip, Cork is determined to get into the Boundary Waters. Not surprisingly, Cork first sees evidence of someone who's not familiar with the etiquette for being the area. And when he discovers a body, he knows it's time to send the youngsters back and asks them to contact the local law enforcement. Meanwhile Cork is going to investigate on his own. What Cork encounters is a pair of brothers seeking a treasure hidden by their father decades prior. The dead man that Cork came across was a third brother who was slowing them down. To say these men are dangerous is downplaying ...

How to write a book for middle school boys - Lesson #1: Put the word 'Fart' in the title. Lesson #2: Include lots of fart puns through the book. Joan Holub's book Fartboy and Reeky Dog completes both lessons. Fart Boy and his classmates are on a special field trip to the museum, but someone gave our intrepid protagonist peanuts and garbanzo beans for dinner - an explosive combination! The resulting massive and stinky farts bring the dinosaur exhibits to life! Fart Boy and his friends have to find a way to stop the rampaging dinosaur bones - as well as the evil Dr. Gravypants - who is also in the museum with some evil plans. I've read a few different 'fart' books for middle schoolers and I was honestly a little underwhelmed with this. The fart humor was like a high-pitched squeaky fart - a little bit forced. Like a lot of books for school-aged readers, this is more than just fart and scat humor - readers might actually learn a little something while snickering...

Reacher! It feels good to have another Reacher novel in hand.  Jack Reacher can be a hard man to find when you want him but when you have the resources of the U.S. military intelligence at your disposal even finding Reacher is possible. Fortunately, General Susan Turner has that ability.  Turner needs to have someone look into an incident - off the record - in which one of her IT reports was killed in Colorado. Officially declared a mugging gone wrong, Turner suspects there's much more to it. And the fact that there is likely a breach in their internal communications suggests that it might be an inside job. Reacher, along with Turner and her most trusted aide, slowly unravel a multi-billion dollar scheme involving cutting edge technology.  Being unable to ask for much help, not knowing who to trust, severely handicaps the trio in their efforts to avenge the slain soldier and secure the military's communications once again. What is there to say about this? It's a Reacher n...

I'm familiar with Magic the Gathering - I understand the mechanics of it and I know people who once played it almost religiously - but I have never played the game or gotten into all the various cards.  I am also generally not a fan of reading books based on a game ... I've yet to read one that I've enjoyed. BUT ... I am a big fan of Seanan McGuire's work and I was definitely curious to see what she could bring to to this game franchise. Five students from different worlds/universes/realities are invited to attend Strixhaven - an elite school for training those who already have a propensity for wielding magic. There's a war that's been devastating the Multiverse. Some worlds have managed to come through fairly well so far, but others have been all but destroyed. One student, Eula Blue, comes to Strixhaven from a world that has not survived the war very well, and she feels like an outsider in a community of outsiders. The new group of students is setting the stag...

An unusual magical illness is affecting the children of Boston. Junior Auditor Grimshaw Griswald Grimsby and his partner, the veteran Hunstman Mayflower, are tasked by the Department of Unorthodox Affairs with uncovering the cause and putting a stop to it - by any means necessary - before it spreads even further. It doesn't take long into the investigation, however, before Grimsby and Mayflower encounter some strange beings that appear to have ancient origins and a heck of a lot of magic power. The duo will visit a depth far below the streets of Boston to face off against unbelievable monsters and then off to a completely different reality, drawing on every bit of knowledge and strength they can muster to protect the humans on earth. This series actually is getting better and better with each book. The character of Grimsby has grown nicely through the series so far and while I've read the previous three books, I don't think it's necessary to have read them in order to e...

On the surface, it would appear that FBI agent Kate O'Hare is hot on the trail of con man Nicolas Fox. The truth, however, is that the pair are working together to bring down some of the biggest criminals in the crime business - people who are untouchable by standard, legal means. People like Evan Trace - the casino magnate know for his welcoming of the wealthiest patrons who like taking risks, but also known for his brutality. To infiltrate Trace's kingdom, Fox and O'Hare will have to get Trace's interest and an invitation to gamble 'off-the-record' - which is part of his major money-laundering operation. And to do that, they'll have to look and act the part of a couple of billionaires just looking to have a good time, even if it means losing a few million on some gambling. And to do that ... well, the FBI won't miss a few million dollars if it gets put back in time, right? Fox and O'Hare will be pit against some of the world's most dangerous mo...

My youth was spent reading a lot of sword & sorcery (Robert E. Howard, Lin Carter, Fritz Leiber, etc) and playing a great deal of dungeons and dragons. Since then (some 40-50 years later!) I've had a desire to recreate some of that youthful S&S and D&D fun. It would seem a natural fit then to read books from the Dungeons & Dragons publishing company. Maybe it's that my expectations are too high, but I've just not found the enjoyment that I've been hoping for. This book is the fourth in a series and perhaps this is some of the problem because I never felt pulled into the story. I was an observer to the action rather than experiencing the action. The story: A pounding rain is disrupting everything in Sea of Fallen Stars and the coastal areas around it. From destroyed crops to to a halt in trading, the people affected are willing to do anything to recover. That includes worshiping the dreaded goddess Umberlee. Umberlee's chosen warrior is an undead pira...

Like a lot of urban fantasy readers, I consider myself a fan of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series. Anything with Jim Butcher's name on it is going to get my attention in the form of reading the book. This is, though, only the second time I've read a collection edited by Butcher and Kerrie L. Hughes (and the last time I did so was nine years ago!), and I was really looking forward to it. Sadly, it didn't quite live up to my expectations, which is doubly surprising not only because the hands of Butcher and Hughes are over everything, but because there are some big names included here. For my tastes, three stories stood out above the rest.  Two of those were from our two editors, Jim Butcher's "Mister Petty" (a Dresden Files story featuring Goodman Gray ... a monster P.I.) and Kerrie L. Hughes' "The Broom" (which was easily my favorite piece in the book - it's a bit darker, which I really liked).  Probably my second favorite was "A Cle...

 As a fan of the original Star Trek television series, I've been supportive of all the subsequent shows under the Star Trek umbrella. But as my heart is with TOS (The Original Series), my favorite episodes of the other series' are those that connect directly to TOS. Scotty recreating the older, familiar Enterprise bridge in the holodeck of a Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) is one, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 's (DS9) "Trials and Tribble-ations" episode is another. This short book (only 133 pages) takes a look at how "Trials and Tribble-ations" came about and what it took to make the show looks as authentic as it did. It's been some time since I last watched this particular episode (maybe as long ago as a decade?), but I remember being excited but how great it looked - how incorporating the DS9 crew appeared seamless. It didn't look like simple green-screen technology ... and it wasn't. I had not realized how much work was put into ...

Every once in awhile, while we watched the adventures of Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise , we would get glimpses of other ships, crews, and their captains. But clearly the Federation had an entire fleet of ships and crews who are exploring and expanding Federation presence in the galaxy.  Not everyone is as wild and rogue as Kirk. Regular Star Trek author, David Mack, begins a new series set in the Star Trek original series universe. Two Federation ships are assigned to explore the Taurus Reach area. The scout class ship, U.S.S. Sagittarius , detects unusual energy readings from the planet, Nereus II - where there are no known civilizations with warp drive capabilities. But upon exploration, they discover that the indigenous people, the Tomol, are (in some ways) more advanced than what had previously been detected. However, they are also slightly unusual in that there are no people older than 20 among them. As the members of the research vessel discuss and m...

STAR TREK WEEK While I have, to date, watched every episode of every Star Trek series and read many of the original series novels, and one or two from The Next Generation , Deep Space Nine , and even Enterprise , I'd not read anything from the Voyager series. Probably for good reason. But I had this book on my Kindle (I don't remember where I got it but it was probably on sale at some point). With my usual (bad) luck, this happens to be the third book in a trilogy. There's an imbalance of dark matter in different universes which is causing the universes to merge. The effects, if they do, would threaten both universes and everything that lives in each. It will be up to the crew of Voyager to rescue both universes. Seeking help, Chakotay and Paris visit a planet in the 'other' merging universe, but the locals don't take too kindly to the invaders and their prophecy of devastation. And in their 'own' universe, Captain Janeway and crew are madly searching ...

STAR TREK WEEK It's time for some reminiscing as the last (first) time I read this book was when it first came out in 1981. Anything that was Star Trek (and for me it was especially any new stories rather than toys) was hungrily devoured. This was the first original novel to be published by Pocket Books (though let's be clear ... this was not the first original Star Trek novel. There were 16 original story novels published by Bantam before Pocket got the rights). In the story - Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise are tasked with transporting a once-brilliant, now extremely dangerous criminal physicist Dr. Georges Mordreaux to a rehabilitation center. Mordreaux is accused of promising to send people back in time but instead murders them. Shortly into the voyage, Mordreaux escapes his Enterprise confinement, gets onto the bridge, and in front of the entire bridge crew, murder Captain James T. Kirk. Always one to see possibilities, Spock must travel back in time to prevent the...

STAR TREK WEEK  For those who aren't strong Star Trek fans and/or who haven't given much thought to the various incarnations of the series, when the 'new' movies came out, directed by J.J. Abrams and starring Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, this has been referred to as the "Kelvin timeline." I'm not going to go into an explanation about this - there are entire websites dedicated to this and it would be easier, if interested, to check out one of those.  But it's important here because author Mike Johnson has taken what I think is a rather brilliant approach to this. Assuming that the Kelvin timeline is an alternate universe or alternate timeline, still with people known as Kirk, Spock, Uhuru, etc and have similar but not identical experiences, we've got 79 episodes-worth of existing stories to explore - to see how they might be different.  And that's what Johnson does here, taking the very general story from the original series' episode ...

 I tend to be very leery of books that advertise some literary award on the cover.  In my experience, most literary award winning books are winners because of how they played with form rather than substance and I've rarely enjoyed a literary award winning book and this was no exception. In a suburb of Algiers an unnamed man escapes a troubled past by caring for an old man with dementia. When the old man dies, the unnamed care-giver disappears without a trace. A local police detective is called upon to investigate the old man's death and the disappearance of the unnamed man. The investigation takes the detective to many locations where he meets people who crossed-paths with the now-gone care-giver. Slowly the detective forms a picture of the missing man and it is a dark and dangerous picture. This was slow.  Very, very slow. And slow in itself isn't always bad, but I never felt like it was going anywhere. And, frankly, it didn't. I was drawn to this because of the title....

Lee Weston has been summoned, by his father, to hurry back to his family ranch in New Mexico. But when Lee arrives, he finds that his father has been killed and the ranch has been burned down. There's no doubt in Lee's mind that Harvey Dodge - owner of the largest ranch in the territory - is responsible. Determined to get his vengeance, Lee heads into town and ends up in a gunfight with several of Dodge's hired hands. Wounded and now finding himself on the wrong side of the law, Lee goes on the lam to tend to his wounds. While hiding out, he is discovered by a beautiful woman who nurses him back to health. In addition to being quite beautiful, the woman is also strong-minded, a quality Lee finds very attractive. They quickly fall in love with one another but Lee later learns that she's the daughter of Harvey Dodge. Can he kill the man who killed his father, and still get the girl? I quite enjoyed this story. It's no secret that I enjoy reading westerns and fiction f...