Category Archives: Lilypad-Library

Books, blurbs, and bullrushes

High Five by Janet Evanovich (2000) – BR00101 (2017) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
January 19 2017

Plot or Premise

Plum is on her fifth outing, looking for her missing uncle and one angry little man. Uncle Fred was complaining about paying for garbage pickup, and the truck skipped his house. So he went into complain and disappeared. Of course, he’s in the Plum family, so the weird part is he left behind photos of severed body parts in garbage bags. Aunt Mabel wants Stephanie to look for him, although she’s not entirely sure she wants the cheap bastard found and brought home. Plus, a midget missed his court date.

What I Liked

Stephanie’s family is definitely on the wild side, and the uncle is pretty out there for 70. Fun to see all the pieces at play. Plus Stephanie decides she needs to “diversify” her income sources, so asks Ranger to help mentor her in new areas (i.e., to work for him), so we get to see more of his line of work and meet his crew/employees (like Tank). And Lulu and Stephanie chasing the short guy are hilarious to read.

What I Didn’t Like

Morelli’s family is not as much fun as the Plums, and fairly one-dimensional. Plus Benito Ramirez is back, and is just annoying. My biggest objection though is a “cliff-hanger” ending on the romance side that deliberately plays with point-of-view to keep it vague who Stephanie is talking with at her door.

The Bottom Line

Fully embrace the crazy.

Trace by Warren Murphy (1981) – BR00100 (2017) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
January 14 2017

Plot or Premise

Devlin Tracy is a claims investigator working for an insurance company. The VP gives him a case to investigate — a friend of the President of the company is in a sanatorium, one of the other patients changed their beneficiary on their insurance policy just before they died, and the doctor at the sanatorium got the winfall. The President is afraid that his friend will be pressured to do the same, and the President wants Trace to make sure there’s nothing weird going on.

What I Liked

Warren Murphy was the creator of several other series, and while some of those were kind of pulp-style, this one is a full “standard” detective novel. Wise-cracking, determined, but not always the fastest to figure things out. Trace works hard, keeps poking until something shakes loose, and then grabs on and won’t let go until whatever scheme falls apart. All the elements of the series are here — drinking like a fish, sleeping with suspects, wearing a little frog pin that records conversations, and a bit of a blundering style that worms his way into lots of situations. There are sub-stories with drugs and potential lawsuits, but mostly it is just about Trace shaking things up.

What I Didn’t Like

He has a girlfriend, of sorts, and her portrayal in this one is more annoying than usual for the series. Plus she comes in near the end as a super-detective to help solve the case, but Trace was doing fine on his own. She helps him out, as she often does, but she was mostly superfluous for this outing.

The Bottom Line

Great intro to a great series.

Catch Me: Kill Me by William H. Hallahan (1977) – BR00082 (2016) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
April 16 2016

Plot or Premise

Set in the 1970s, a Russian poet has sought asylum in the U.S. Days before he qualifies for citizenship, he is kidnapped from Grand Central Station. Why was he taken? How can they help him? Where is he?

What I Liked

The story diverges on two tracks — a black-bag CIA operative comes in from the cold just enough to maintain full deniability while he looks for the missing poet. At the same time, an FBI manager keeps poking and prodding trying to find out why. Neither one knows the other exists, and the two stories remain fully compartmentalized.

What I Didn’t Like

The opening is extremely descriptive, almost one step removed from the action, and it takes a while until you fully engage in the two tracks.

The Bottom Line

I see why it won awards.

Four to Score by Janet Evanovich (1998) – BR00074 (2016) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
March 28 2016

Plot or Premise

Stephanie Plum has settled in to her job as a bounty hunter, and so picking up a missing NJ girl who failed to appear after stealing her boyfriend’s truck seems like a cakewalk. And there’s a bonus — the boyfriend is willing to give her money too to find her and get some supposed love letters back from her. Easy peasy. Except nothing is easy for Plum, ever. The missing girl wants to stay missing, and her mother and co-worker are helping. Even when somebody else is looking for the girl too, and willing to hurt people to get them to talk.

What I Liked

Plum has an extra helper in this case, a guy who’s good with codes and clues. A flamboyant cross-dresser, he livens up the scene. And the relationship with Moretti leaps forward with the two cohabitating for a while. I love the scenes where the women were talking about guns and what type of gun to carry, use, etc.

What I Didn’t Like

There are some baddies who are painfully obviously involved, which Plum misses for most of the book. And someone who is out to get her is obvious as well. Also painful to watch. Oh, and one of my favourite characters, Ranger, has nothing to do for the entire book. More like an afterthought to include him.

The Bottom Line

Fast-paced, silly plot

Making progress on book reviews

The PolyBlog
March 5 2016

Way back in the dark ages of the late 1990s, I had an idea for a personal website. I had been sending out a personal newsletter full of humour and quotes, sometimes movie reviews, and I was also running a trivia game by email. It was just a small distribution group for the humour and stuff, larger for the trivia games, and I even got a few movie reviews posted on a local movie times site. I found that I really enjoyed it. But I wondered if I could move it from email to a website.

Over the years, I tried multiple layouts, formats, even types of back-end software to display it, but most of the core content elements remained the same. Somewhere in there I thought, “What if I posted book reviews too?” After all, I was reading a lot. But I tended to finish the book, throw it on a shelf, and move on. I wasn’t looking to become a reviewer for a newspaper, just some personal thoughts shared, well, somewhere other than a journal.

Last year, I finally said, “Okay, let’s figure this out right this time.” I figured out a layout, I figured out a workflow for myself, and I figured out where I wanted to post them. Plus, just for fun, I started updating my approach to book reviews (i.e. a personal “review” philosophy, if you will). Again, I don’t want to be a professional reviewer, but I also don’t want to be an online equivalent of grunting “Book good”.

I managed to figure all that out, but I didn’t get many posted with the full workflow. My goal for this year was to clear the initial backlog…thirty-six reviews that were written, posted somewhere originally, and relatively ready to go. Just not in the new format. I have been steadily munching away at them, a day here and a day there, a book review here and a book review there, and plowed through a whack of them today to finish it off.

I finally have all 36 up on the site, fully linked to the various review sites out there. I even have an index designed for all the book reviews, just need to populate these 36 in the list. It’s a bit tedious, but it was easier to wait until all 36 were done before trying to populate them all into the multiple indices.

I have a few more sitting in the wings, waiting to be finished, polished, or reorganized from notes into an actual review, but the bulk of the work? I’m calling it done like dinner. Woohoo me! 🙂