An intoxicating start to a tale about facing down the ghosts of the past.
An emotionally haunted detective and a laboratory-made vampire struggle with their unnatural attraction in the first book in Bellon’s (Embracing You, Embracing Me, 2012, etc.) new Rogue Saga.
Shyla Ericson, a Los Angeles police detective, has not had an easy life. After killing her sexually abusive father when she was just a teenager, and losing her mother to suicide a few years later, she left her hometown of Redding, Calif., and started over in Los Angeles. Since then, she’s buried herself in her work, and has kept her co-workers at arm’s length. She also uses alcohol to keep the nightmares of her past at bay. But when her captain offers her the biggest case of her career, she can’t say no; it’s her chance to go undercover and to take down Victor Champlain, an up-and-coming drug lord. The problem is that Champlain operates out of Redding, so Ericson will have to return to the town that haunts her dreams. Meanwhile, Champlain has acquired a new bodyguard named Brennan Miles, who’s spent the last 10 years as a prisoner in a laboratory, getting genetic modifications that have given him strength, speed and a craving for blood. Those attributes prove useful to Champlain, who purchased Miles’ loyalty by breaking him out. But as the undercover Ericson spends time with Miles, he begins to rediscover his humanity, and she also feels an attraction that she can’t explain. As the case builds and Champlain gets suspicious, Miles and Ericson must confront their loyalties, their pasts and their feelings for each other. Meanwhile, Ericson also becomes emotionally invested in the fate of a young girl from a broken family. Overall, the story’s pace is steady, but not particularly fast. However, award-winning author Bellon puts a lot of humanity into her emotionally charged thriller, fleshing out her intriguing story with living, breathing characters. She engagingly explores how Miles can’t escape from what he has become, for example, and how Ericson decides what route she wants her life to take as she struggles to close the case. By the end, readers will be eagerly awaiting the next installment in the saga.
An intoxicating start to a tale about facing down the ghosts of the past.Pub Date: March 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991213122
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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