Category Archives: Lilypad-Library

Books, blurbs, and bullrushes

Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald (1964) – BR00269 (R2025) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
May 8 2025

Plot or Premise

An Army buddy of McGee’s asks for help looking into the death of his sister’s fiancé, Howard Plummer. While Plummer looks to have been the victim of a simple mugging, the sister isn’t so sure that her pure, sweet Howard wasn’t somehow into something shady involving extra cash. McGee wants to help the buddy, but he also wants to know about piles of cash.

What I Liked and Didn’t Like

There are really four parts to the story, and I confess I don’t like them equally. The first part is the fiancé, the sister and the Army buddy. They may be the clients and written sympathetically, but they’re not particularly interesting.

The second segment is the crooks who have their hooks into a wealthy man who lives a bit of an isolated life from his ex-wife and two kids. While there’s a femme fatale running around, there’s not enough substance to her to make her truly menacing or truly attractive.

The third segment involves some badly written noir involving an involuntary stay at a psych hospital, overuse of some bad drugs, and the fear of lobotomies mixed with brainwashing. It’s just all way over the top.

However, there is some fifth business in the mix. One of the tertiary characters that McGee goes to talk to is an aging well-to-do woman who McGee knows from back in the day, and they work well together. She is the most interesting person in the story, albeit a bit shallowly developed. I’d love to see a story just about her life, to be honest.

The mystery is decent, the plot / grift has some spark for the time, but the roller-coaster reads as way too farfetched even for the period. A little too pulpy, even for McGee stories.

The Bottom Line

Too much psychobabble, not enough mystery

The Deep Blue Good-by by John D. MacDonald (1964) – BR00268 (R2025) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸

The PolyBlog
May 6 2025

Plot or Premise

A dancer, Chookie McCall, has a friend, Cathy, whose father might have had some buried World War II loot. A guy named Junior Allen seems to have found it and run off with it, and she has no way to get it back. So, Chookie introduces Cathy to her friend Travis to see if he can help.

What I Liked

The classic series of 21 books starts with this one, with all of the main elements of the series apparent in the first two chapters.

Travis McGee is taking his retirement in fits and starts, not waiting until he’s 60 to take it all at once. He lives aboard a houseboat he won in a card game, and specializes in difficult salvage, retrieving things other people have stolen or conned away from rightful owners who have no legal way to get it back. His usual fee for a successful recovery? 50% of anything recovered.

Junior Allen is a piece of work and delights in destroying women. In addition to stealing from Cathy and her family, he also moved into a house of a rich widow named Lois, and raped, abused and gaslit her into a puddle of a human. Travis manages to help her heal and get back on her feet while he goes after Junior. Some teens get involved as further victims, but in the end, Travis is mostly the smarter man.

What I Didn’t Like

Travis’ relations with women are always half-positive/half-negative. He always treats them relatively with respect, far ahead of his time, but his solution to most of their healing is hanging around his houseboat, enjoying the sun, until they have enough self-respect again to want to bed the knight who saved them. This story is a bit raw in places, more so than some of his later books. But it’s still an amazing story.

The Bottom Line

The legend begins with a busted flush

Verity by Colleen Hoover (2018) – BR00267 (R2025) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
April 29 2025

Plot or Premise

A struggling writer gets hired under somewhat odd circumstances to finish a popular series by another author who has become incapacitated. She moves into the house with the author, her husband, and child, and starts to develop feelings for the husband.

What I Liked and Didn’t Like

I confess upfront that I am not a giant fan of Colleen Hoover nor romance thrillers, but the premise of an author taking over a popular series was too intriguing to resist. I tend to skip the genre as I find too often that the “thriller” part strays too close to domestic violence porn even if you know the woman will win in the end.

I wasn’t wrong about the intrigue of Lowen Ashleigh taking over a writing series from Verity Crawford. When she’s in the writer’s realm, struggling with figuring out how to advance the series and tell a “Verity-style” story, the pages sing. It’s great. When she finds what appears to be a cross between an unpublished biography and a personal journal of Verity’s, Lowen’s story starts to morph into multiple strands of wanting to fill in for Verity, the person, not just the author.

I’m not big on romance unless it’s more two people working on something in a will they or won’t they style of romantic tension, while this one is more isolation together. And while I see Lowen’s morphing into caring about Jeremy (she’s reading about him in the journal), Jeremy spends very little time with Lowen, far too little to be falling deeply in love with her. Pretty unrealistic, in my view. However, their scenes together are not terrible. I quite enjoyed their interplay at times. If it ran for another 2 books, I might see it.

However, I didn’t like three aspects of the story. There is a very traumatic event right at the start that is total coincidence. I kept waiting for it to somehow tie together, but of course, it doesn’t. Secondly, there is a plot device used throughout 80% of the novel, and it is incredibly unrealistic, so the big twist at the end isn’t much of a twist. You’ve seen it coming from the beginning. Lastly, there is an extra twist and explanation at the end, all of which brings most of what happened in the book back to a situation of relatively simple misunderstanding. It felt more like a sitcom than a strong novel, where two characters have a miscommunication, never discuss it, and both go off in weird directions, only to lead to tragedy, almost Shakespearean in terms of misconnects for bad plotting.

Disclosure

I received a free copy of this book through an Amazon promotion. I am not personally friends with the author, nor have I ever interacted with them.

The Bottom Line

Too many shaky plot devices, but a good story for the writer’s part

There’s a Hole in My Bucket by Royd Tolkien (2021) – BR00266 (R2025) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
April 28 2025

Plot or Premise

Subtitled a tale of two brothers, Royd and Mike Tolkien are the great-grandsons of J.R.R. Tolkien. That is the least interesting part of their story. The book combines an interspersed tale of Mike’s last few years of life with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS (also called Lou Gehrig’s Disease or Motor Neurone Disease / MND) and Royd’s first couple of years after his death, fulfilling a bucket list that Mike created for Royd to do when Mike was gone.

What I Liked

I have no idea what I was thinking when I first started to read this just over a year ago. I heard about it in a roundabout way in a blog, and it sounded cool and funny. So, about 16 months ago, at Christmas, I downloaded it and started to read. The first story is one of the best. As Royd walks up to the podium to give the eulogy for Mike, he falls flat on his face. A big faceplant with lots of noise and kerfuffle. Except it’s a prat fall. Nobody else knew it was the first item on Mike’s bucket list — that Royd would fall as he went to deliver the eulogy and give everyone a last big smile for Mike’s funeral. And when it happened, it wiped me out. Funny, sure. Moving, absolutely. And it set a precedent for a lot of the stories. I couldn’t keep going. For whatever reason, the raw grief was too much. I set the book aside, and promised myself I would go back to it.

And then something weird happened. My brother died. And while you would think that would STOP me from ever reading the rest, it gave me a window into the story. Wondering if I would have the nerve to do the things that Mike put on Royd’s list, even things where Royd was terrified. Would I have completed a list my brother made me? I doubt it.

The pratfall? Sure. Bungee jumping or skydiving? Not a chance. A lot of the travel? Absolutely. For the rest, it would be hit and miss. Busking, singing in a musical, etc. Mike’s goal was to break Royd out of a bubble, to overcome potential shyness or risk of embarrassment, to thrust him into a limelight. The story alternates between Mike’s decline and Royd’s desire to film all of it as a documentary, with the end for Mike obvious but unknown for Royd.

What I Didn’t Like

Many of the “stunts” are a little too well-choreographed or exuberant for me. For example, when Royd goes on a plane, he has to dress like Gandalf, the whole company is involved, etc. Simpler would have seemed more impactful to me, and less about the show. And I think that is my biggest complaint in places. There are some huge moments that pass by with very little comment on the psychology and impact on Royd; he survives them, he participates in them, but there seems little reflection. Others, by contrast are small with huge reflections. And the reflection is what matters. The end for Royd is really quite disappointing. He saves a big moment for the end, and at the last minute, it doesn’t really happen. More like a postponement to do a sequel of the last act. I felt a little cheated, to be honest, and the reason for a drop in rating from 5 to 4 stars. I liked the journey, but was let down by the destination.

The Bottom Line

Starts with a thud, finishes with a whisper

What Lies Beyond the Veil by Harper L. Woods (2022) – BR00265 (R2025) – 🐸🐸⚪⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
February 7 2025

Plot or Premise

A young woman chosen for sacrifice at an annual festival escapes into the woods and discovers she has powers and a destiny.

What I Liked and Didn’t Like

I will confess up front that I am not a hard-core fantasy romance lover. I’ll read Lord of the Rings, I like Game of Thrones, a bunch of other series, but I tend more toward fantasy and light romance than hard core fantasy and sex. And for the first 50% of the story, I was into the plot. She meets a strong warrior with similar powers, there’s some battle scenes, and while the warrior is a bit arrogant and graphic about his sexual desire for the lead character, it’s mostly about travelling to find a refuge for their kind.

However, just past the midpoint of this first book in a trilogy, the romance starts to become much more sexually explicit, with some very rough edges. At the risk of a small spoiler, there is a rough sexual scene that is equal parts exhibitionism and voyeurism, and yet also equally gratuitous. There’s no plot reason for the change in behaviour other than the man’s desire and misogynistic possession of the woman. It is nominally consensual but I’ve read rape scenes in books that were less disturbing or glorified. Almost a rape fantasy, totally from the man’s POV, with no real explanation of why the normally independent woman goes along.

The last 20% of the book is just plain abusive towards the main character. There’s a reason, such as it is, tied to the plot and a big twist, but it left me with no interest in continuing to read the series. I want my time back wasted on this trash. Oddly, up until the mid-book change in direction, it was decent…maybe even 4 stars? But the last half of the book was all downhill. And not reading the next two is a huge indication of my opinion…I always finish series, and based on the first third of the book, I had already acquired the next two. I’ve since deleted them from my TBR pile and moved on.

The Bottom Line

The ending is graphically sexually violent with little warning