Manhattan has many secrets. Some are older than the city itself.

Book Review:  Winter of the Gods by Jordanna Max Brodsky

It's been 3 months since Selene (Artemis), a few of her fellow Greek gods, and a Professor of Classic Mythology, worked together to uncover a cult trying to resurrect the Eleusinian Mysteries.  She's in a foul mood -- she hasn't punished a wrongdoer in at least a week, and it's December in Manhattan -- all of the hallmarks of Christmas are grating on her nerves -- she has a lot of rage to vent.  She is enjoying getting cozy with Professor Theo Shulz, however.  When he's not singing or humming Christmas carols, that is.  Or joking about sex.  She says that she spent enough time being what mankind imagined, and now she will decide who she is -- but she's not entirely sure it works that way.  Her powers are already significantly diminished from what they were when men believed in her.  What happens if she chooses to let go of her chastity, one of the main attributes men imbued her with?

That's a question she'll have to come back to.  Another cult has made a sacrifice, a man sprawled atop Wall Street's Charging Bull statue, surrounded by a variety of ritualistic symbols.  When she and Theo receive the call from Detective Freeman, Selene assumes the worst -- that her fellow gods are replicating the methods used by Orion, in the hopes of regaining their former powers.  She's wrong -- this time it's the gods who are being sacrificed.  But by whom and why?

Aside of Selene's choice of punishment for a rapist, which seems likely to have consequences for the bears involved (which she should have considered), I really enjoyed this book.  The mystery is excellent.  What I loved though is that Brodsky again writes her characters true to the original myths but allows for believable growth and regret.  All of the gods have acted rashly and criminally over the millennia and this storyline confronts them with their misdeeds.

I may not have bought the quick romance between Selene and Theo in the first book, The Immortals, but I bought the relationship struggles they face in this book.  Utterly and completely.  And I was happy with the way things were between them at the end.  We'll see what happens in the next book, Olympus Bound.  It's checked out and on my nightstand at home!

The Greek Gods are alive and well and living in Manhattan

Book Review:  The Immortals by Jordanna Max Brodsky

When people stopped believing in the gods, the gods began to diminish.  They still walk among mortals though.  Artemis now goes by the name Selene DiSilva and she calls Manhattan home.  Her powers may be greatly diminished but she can still handle mortals.  Or can she?  As the story begins and she intervenes to save yet another woman from an abusive man, she finds herself wondering if this is the fight she won’t win.  She does win, but just barely.  Has she finally grown so weak that a mere man can defeat her?  As troubling as that thought is, Selene soon discovers there’s something that frightens her even more.  Someone is trying to resurrect the Eleusinian Mysteries and they are upping the ante by using human sacrifice.  Selene suspects that it’s one of her fellow gods, trying to regain former powers.

This is the first entry in the Olympus Bound series and it’s intriguing.  I liked Brodsky’s interpretation of not only the histories of the Greek gods, but also what they would be like if they were among us today.  And I appreciated Selene’s observations about her fellow gods, particularly Persephone.

The mystery was okay — the gods don’t really hide themselves all that well but why should they bother?  No one believes in them anyway.  I had most of the bad guys figured out but not the main one.  That one caught me by surprise but in a good way.  The tension level was excellent.

The romance, and yes, there is one, sort of — that didn’t really work for me.  Let me amend that.  I felt the romance of Artemis and Orion.  Brodsky sold that very well.  Selene and this guy, not so much.  Aside of the glimpses of her past with Orion, Selene is a pretty icy character.  During her heyday, she may have allowed herself to care about her handmaidens, but these days she keeps everyone at an emotional distance.  She protects women but she doesn’t care about any one of them individually.  I would expect that countless years of only exposing herself to the worst of men would have hardened her against them particularly.  Yet somehow,  while trying to figure out the next move of a fellow immortal intent on sacrificing human lives for godly power, she finds herself drawn to a man she originally suspected of murder?  Over the course of a few books, maybe.  All in the same book though?  Which took place in something like 10 days?  It felt rushed.  Not a deal-breaker though.  

Originally posted on my wordpress blog on January 12, 2017.  Reposting it here as I'm preparing to review its sequels, Winter of the Gods and Olympus Bound.

Don't you know that you're toxic?

Book Review:  Gone Without a Trace by Mary Torjussen

Hannah returns home from a training session in Oxford, to find that her boyfriend of four years, Matt, is gone.  His belongings have been removed from their house and her belongings have been rearranged to the way they were when the house was hers alone.  Every text she's ever sent him has been deleted from her phone, as well as every photo of him.  His social media accounts have disappeared.  She can find no trace of him, except for one, an old social media photo that he was never tagged in.  

She's desperate to know what happened.  Consumed by the need to know where Matt is, she starts slipping at work -- and it's noticed.  Once on-track for a promotion, she finds herself in danger of losing her job.  It doesn't matter though -- she's certain that once she finds Matt, everything will be okay.  Until she does -- and it isn't.

At first, I questioned whether Matt was a real person or a figment of her imagination, but he's real.  Hannah is an unreliable narrator though -- there are plenty of hints to indicate this throughout the book.  There's more to her history with Matt than she is willing to admit -- and that's what kept me reading.  Hannah is not a likeable character.  She has toxic relationship with her best friend (also not a likeable character) and there's something amiss with her parents.  And it's simply hard to relate to someone so fixated on someone else.  I kept reading because I wanted to know what happened between Matt and Hannah that was so bad that he felt the need to disappear so completely.  I had a guess and I was close to the truth.

The ending offers a twist with all sorts of questions.  A solid but tough read.  I don't always have to like the main character to like the book -- I loved Gone Girl and The Perfect Ghost, but I still don't know how to sum up my reaction to this one.  Uncomfortable?  It was well-written and I'll admit that I flipped its pages furiously, to see what happened next.  Maybe it's the fact that Hannah is so unrelatable for me -- Gone Girl's Amy was a monster, yes, but there were parts of her story I could empathize with, and The Perfect Ghost was so brilliantly written that I had to re-read it immediately.  I suppose what troubles me about Hannah is that I don't understand her obsession with Matt -- he's not the first guy to leave her -- but he is the first guy to disappear.  Maybe if he'd just moved out but left a note, it would have been different?  

Surrounded by enemies

Book Review:  Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

Linnet seems to have it all -- she's smart, beautiful, and wealthy.  She cherishes her independence and scoffs at the idea of marriage -- until she meets her best friend's fiance, Simon Boyle.  Within a few months, Linnet and Simon are married -- and Linnet's former best friend Jackie is furious.

Hercule Poirot is on holiday in Egypt when he encounters Linnet and Simon on their honeymoon.  Jackie is there as well; she's been following them everywhere and it's wearing on Linnet's nerves.  Jackie even manages to book herself on the same Nile cruise, even though Simon booked passage under an assumed name, in the hopes of losing her for a short time.

Linnet attempts to employ Poirot to convince Jackie to stop following them but he declines.  He feels sorry for Jackie, however, and tries to convince her to let go of the past, to no avail.  And then, one night after Poirot has gone to bed, Jackie shoots Simon in front of witnesses.  It's only a leg wound but later that night, Linnet is shot in the head.  Jackie is under observation, so she couldn't have done it.  Who did?


Once again, stereotyping is an issue -- ugh.  That said, this was another fascinating mystery.  Christie excels at making all manner of distracting circumstances plausible; there's no shortage of crimes or suspects.  Poirot keeps at least one significant clue to himself, which is annoying, but there are enough clues to allow an attentive reader to arrive at the same conclusions he did.  Unfortunately, that reader was not me -- once again, I needed him to spell it out for me and then it made perfect sense.  One of these days, Poirot, I will figure out a mystery before you reveal the answer . . . .

It's better to give than to receive surprises

Book Review:  Taltos by Steven Brust

The fourth book in the Vlad Taltos series, Taltos, takes us back in time to the events before Yendi.  So, if you're keeping track, the fourth book in the series is the first book chronologically -- so far. While I'm normally a stickler for seeing characters develop in a linear fashion, I also enjoy a good flashback.  This was an excellent flashback.

When we first saw Vlad, Morrolan, Sethra, and Aliera together in Jhereg, they were friendly, despite the fact that Vlad was both an Easterner and a member of the House of Jhereg, and the other three were Dragaerans of the House of Dragon.  Well, Morrolan and Aliera at least -- I'm not sure which House Sethra was born into, but she's two hundred thousand years old and a force to be reckoned with.  Dragaerans typically look down upon members of other Houses; Dragaerans also typically despise Easterners so it's a toss-up as to what they'll find most offensive about Vlad.  Having been regularly beaten by Dragaerans since he was a young child, Vlad generally hates all of them on principle.  So, how did this foursome become so friendly?

It all began when Morrolan and Sethra needed an Easterner who could handle a difficult task.  Why an Easterner?  Because Dragaerans rely a great deal on sorcery for protection and they don't think to include Easterners among the things they need to protect themselves against.  That difficult task led to another, this one likely impossible, a journey to and return from the Paths of the Dead.  The journey there was merely tricky -- it was the journey back that was the problem.  And it was the journey back that forged the bonds among them.

I've been curious about Vlad and Morrolan's trip to the Paths of the Dead since catching the mention of it in Jhereg and I wasn't disappointed.  It's an eerie place.  Vlad offers description of it, of course, but his, Loiosh's, and Morrolan's reactions to it bring it to life.  As creepy as this place is, there's still humor -- Vlad is simply an entertaining narrator, even when he's scared out of his wits.

A second storyline gives us more details about Vlad's relationship with both his father and his grandfather (love Noish-pa!).  Noish-pa refers to the Dragaerans as elfs and creatures of Faerie; he also remembers his home in the East as having a blue sky, white clouds, and a yellow sun (the Empire has an oppressive orange-red sky).  So many questions!  One -- what happened to the sky in the Empire?  Two -- why are Easterners leaving the East, with its pretty skies, to live in a dreary land where they are despised for being Easterners?  Three -- the specific mention of elves and faerie makes me think of our mythology -- is this fictional world set on Earth in the future?  Or, are the Easterners transplants from Earth?  *Jhereg informs us that aliens were up to all sorts of shenanigans, way back when.  Perhaps Dragaerans and Easterners began as the same race?  They both refer to themselves as human but there are clear genetic differences between them.

So many questions!  But back to a general overview of the book -- there's a reason why this book takes its name from its protagonist rather than one of the Great Houses of the Dragaeran Empire -- not only does it offer more detail about Vlad's childhood, but it also offers more detail about Vlad's transition from working in his dad's restaurant, to becoming an enforcer, to becoming an assassin.  We're given given insight into the first time Vlad *knew* he killed someone, as well as the first time he accepted work as an assassin -- and his reactions to both events.  And we're left with questions about Vlad's mother and Kiera.  Who was Vlad's mother and what happened to her?  Can Kiera see the future?  I suspect she can.  What is Vlad's ultimate role in the Empire?  There must be a reason Kiera looks out for him.

A third storyline, and the only one that bothered me as such, was the extended scene of Vlad working a spell.  Each chapter begins with a snippet of that scene, which actually takes place at the end of the book.  I imagine the glimpses of Vlad working a spell were meant to foreshadow the gravity of the situation at the end but I personally think it would have worked better in one piece, at the end.  I re-read those bits, all together, after finishing the book, and I stand by that opinion.