What Lies Beyond the Veil by Harper L. Woods (2022) – BR00265 (R2025) – 🐸🐸⚪⚪⚪
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
The Final Twist by Jeffery Deaver (2021) – BR00264 (R2025) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪
Plot or Premise
Colter Shaw has been poking around his father’s death from years ago and the poking has finally turned up some interesting leads as well as some nasty bad guys who would rather he either stop looking or find for them a missing secret cache of something his father hid. While playing cat and mouse, he uses a safe house that his father had set up long ago but finds someone else has been using it recently — Colter’s absent brother.
What I Liked
I had seen the TV episode where Colter reunites with his brother (the show had a different purpose / intent than the book), so I expected it to happen. And while a bit of a cliché for how it happens, it’s cool to see them together, slowly jockeying around to see how they now relate years later. His brother is a bad-ass merc, which comes in handy when the two need some backup against the big bad guys. There are two sub-plots going on simultaneously — one for a big giant plan if someone can find a missing document and one for a larger plan dealing with real-estate and forced ghettoization followed by gentrification. A little more intricate than you expect to see in your average mystery novel. The action that was a little too much in the previous novel is perfectly at home in this one.
What I Didn’t Like
The story bounces around a little too much, and some links to old cases as well as old partners seem a little contrived. Not enough to detract too far, just makes for a pacing problem when the story veers away from the main plot for too long a time occasionally.
The Bottom Line
Have you met my brother?
The Goodbye Man by Jeffery Deaver (2020) – BR00263 (R2025) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪
Plot or Premise
Colter Shaw is looking for two kids accused of a hate crime, yet neither have a history of such behaviour. They have both been acting off though and their lives are spiralling with every cop looking for them. Shaw finds them, a simple retrieval for their parents, and then the unthinkable happens. One of them happily commits suicide rather than going home. Colter has to know why.
What I Liked
Colter goes undercover at a special actualization camp where everyone is encouraged to revisit all their negative elements from their life in order to eliminate them and to focus on positive elements instead. A brutal self-assessment to get to the final level. The first bits of it all seem entirely normal until it starts be a little more cult-like. It is disturbing how much the cult leader sounds like Donald Trump’s campaign speeches (a deliberate imitation, no doubt, with some of the mannerisms almost 1:1).
What I Didn’t Like
The great way the cult leader becomes more Trump-like also takes away from the story as some of it seems less “God-like” and more satirical or farcical. While all of the members are “broken” over the death of a loved one, there doesn’t seem to be enough in the “cult” methodology to really hold them. The final ending seems more action hero than rewardist.
The Bottom Line
Could have used more creepy cult, less action
Psychology lecture 4: This is your brain, this is your brain on its own drugs
I mentioned in an earlier post about the psych lecture series I’m taking (The Great Courses’ Introduction to Psychology) that I was a bit surprised (I guess?) about the more biological and physiological aspects of the course. Surprised is a little strong of a word, I suppose. I know that the biological and physiological aspects of the body can affect the brain, of course. I just never really thought of that work as part of “psychology” which I see as mental health rather than physical health/medicine, which is where I would put the other stuff.
Lecture 4 talked about the early knowledge and the realization in the 1800s with advances in medicine and the scientific study of the brain that different parts actually do different things aka the “localization of function”. More recent work can use EEGs or MRIs and functional MRIs to do better monitoring.
But I was surprised (there’s that word again) when the lectured covered three different parts of the brain:
- The hindbrain, including the medulla (carrying messages to the spinal cord), the pons (messages within the brain) and the ever-popular and more well-known cerebellum (for fine muscle movement and balance);
- The midbrain, including the reticular formation (for consciousness) and the substantia nigra (for providing dopamine); and,
- The forebrain, including the limbic system (for emotions and memory with amygdala and hippocampus), thalamus (switchboard for sensory info from the rest of the body), hypochalamus (for temperature, basic motives and drives), and cerebral cortex (thin surface layer for more complex behaviours and high mental processes).
Of that long list, I only recognized medulla, cerebellum, thalamus and cerebral cortex, but probably would have only correctly identified the function of the cerebral cortex. I’m not even sure I would have understood the cerebellum and cerebral cortex were different, to be honest. In defence of my ignorance, I never took biology or anatomy; my focus was on physics, so sue me. The lecture also covered the hemispheres and lobes, but I wasn’t that interested until it started talking about neuroplasticity.
I love the idea of the brain fixing itself or rewiring lost connections. For my son, with cerebral palsy-like symptoms, the general medical diagnosis for CP is that there is a break in wiring somewhere. As such, muscles get told to “flex” — and they never get an off signal. They are CONSTANTLY on. So, people with full CP can be diagnosed with an MRI that can point to the actual breakage, and they do physiotherapy, surgery or drugs to treat the symptoms. One of the surgeries goes into the spine and snips a wire so that the signal to the legs is “cut”, no more “on” signal being sent. Of course, that’s pretty major, and you have to restart learning how to walk, but it “corrects” the first problem by giving a second problem that they CAN solve. But the original pathways never change…you don’t have CP and suddenly stop having it. The wires don’t reconnect in that instance (and wouldn’t help my son anyway as that isn’t what he has).
Yet neuroplasticity is the ultimate idea of a cure for a lot of broken connections in the brain. On its own, the brain will repair itself. Physical damage from an injury that affects memory can sometimes be self-repaired as the brain finds a new connection pathway to the old area. I’ve read about it before particularly where it has affected personality, which seems almost bonkers from a purer-psychology perspective. The metaphor is simplistic, but it’s the idea that if you’re trying to get from the living room at the front of your house to the kitchen at the back of the house, and there’s something blocking your way in the dining room, you could theoretically go through the second floor if there are front and back stairs, or out the front door and come in the back door (although the metaphor breaks down). Alternatively, if you’re in an office building and have to get from one office to another, there is a direct way down Hall 1, or an indirect way down Hall 2. Neuroplasticity is the name given to the brain’s ability to heal itself, to find another hallway to get to the same spot and re-establish a link. That repair happens with some medical conditions, but it doesn’t happen with some others. And there isn’t necessarily a solid answer of how it works in the first place or why it doesn’t work in similar injuries elsewhere in the brain. It feels almost like “hacking” your own brain.
Nevertheless, I find it fascinating as an idea. Particularly with the idea that perhaps certain drug cocktails could speed up the routing process and help the brain heal faster. We already know the effects of certain drugs on the brain’s ability to access and retain information (both in good ways and bad), often exaggerated as plot devices in movies and books, even though the basic operations are sound. More obvious and less sensational to me is the finding that the brain actually physically changes with use of certain pathways — like learning to read Braille expanding the language centre of your brain.
Fascinating, I admit. But I’m still not sure I’d classify it as psychology unless the elements change personality or active behavioural cues. I’m not ready to embrace the larger holistic view and the ties to the physiological aspects. I want to believe that consciousness is more important than biology.