Tag Archives: new

Darkest Hour by Jenny Carroll (2001) – BR00031 (2004) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
March 28 2004

Plot or Premise

Suzannah is a mediator — she helps ghosts move on from this plane to the next. But when she’s not embracing her sixth sense, she’s earning money as a staff babysitter at a hotel/resort and dreaming about Jesse who haunts her current home. Then she meets trouble in the form of spoiled brat Jack who can also see ghosts, but doesn’t know that ghosts are actually real and is instead three steps away from a nervous breakdown. Suze has to help him figure out his own role with ghosts, at the same time that she tries to figure out more of the mystery with Jesse’s past life.

What I Liked

I really liked the idea of finding newbies who don’t know what they are supposed to do when it comes to ghosts — hey, didn’t they see the movie? I also still like the fact that Suze can actually interact with the ghosts (i.e., fight with them). The backstory for Jesse was cool, and knowing that Suze can move to another plane at least temporarily is really a good omen for future books. The interesting addition of negative mediators to counter-balance the good mediators is very Tru Calling-ish, and we’ll have to see how that plays out in future books.

What I Didn’t Like

Some of the repeated teenage angst might sit well with teenage readers, but it gets really repetitive fast for older readers.

The Bottom Line

Oh, no, it’s ghosts again!

Note: Also published under the title Young Blood.

So Like Sleep by Jeremiah Healy (1987) – BR00038 (2003) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
October 9 2003

Plot or Premise

John Cuddy gets asked by a friend to look into what appears to be an open-and-shut case — a young impoverished black man tries to get ahead at university, dates a white co-ed, and then after she turns up dead, he confesses to the crime while holding the murder weapon. Everyone thinks he’s guilty, including him. But Cuddy finds a strange group of people involved — a whacked psychiatrist with strange ideas, an elderly fitness nut, a sports fan, seductive patients, and sundry lovers.

What I Liked

The main people were all well-characterized, although a few of them were a bit one-dimensional. Cuddy does a good job of detecting, pulling at a variety of strings until they unravel. Good backstories for some of the other series’ characters.

What I Didn’t Like

Some old characters show up, kind of predictable.

The Bottom Line

You’ll stay up late if you start reading this.

The Collected Short Stories by Jeffrey Archer (1998) – BR00027 (2003) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
July 27 2003

Plot or Premise

This book is an amazing collection of 36 shortstories from a master storyteller combining romance, history, danger, twists, international intrigue, and domestic angst.

What I Liked

The collection is a really nice mix, particularly some of the ones with twist endings. Here is an overview of each of the stories and the ratings for each.

  • NEVER STOP ON THE MOTORWAY: Woman driver is chased by a van down the motorway, with the context backlit by recent rapes and murders. Fantastic twist. 5.00
  • OLD LOVE: Two competitors, one boy, one girl compete against each other in everything including who loves the other more and are inseparable throughout life. 4.50
  • SHOESHINE BOY: Mountbatten (sic) pays a visit to St. George’s where a drastically underfunded Governor rolls out the red carpet. 4.50
  • CHEAP AT HALF THE PRICE: Mrs. Rosenheim wants a bauble from the jewelry store but has to play hustle to get the men in her life to commit to buying it. 4.00
  • BROKEN ROUTINE: A man whose routine is unflappable is somewhat disturbed by a brash youth on the train who wants to read his paper and smoke his cigarettes. Nice twist. 4.50
  • AN EYE FOR AN EYE: A woman has an alibi for the death of her husband: she was not only in the hospital (although the time is shaky) but also blind…or is she? 4.00
  • THE LUNCHEON: A up and coming man takes an attractive (married) woman to lunch to try and get business favours. Unfortunately, lunch is expensive and he has no budget. 3.50
  • THE COUP: Two business rivals are stranded in Nigeria during a coup, and they end up resolving their differences and being the real coup. 3.50
  • THE PERFECT MURDER: A man commits an accidental murder of his mistress after finding out she was also stepping out with another man and manages to frame the man for the murder. A cute twist at the end. 4.00
  • YOU’LL NEVER LEARN TO REGRET IT: David is dying of AIDS and leaving everything to Pat. They trick the insurance company despite his condition and collect handsomely on David’s death. But insurance companies are sometimes trickier than one might think, as are their brokers. 3.75
  • THE FIRST MIRACLE: A cute twist on an old tale has a historical figure running errands around the birth of Christ. 3.50
  • THE LOOPHOLE: Two friends get into a heated argument at the club and not only engage in slander but also physical fighting, leading to a legal battle and an eventual settlement, yet the two remain friends. 4.00
  • THE HUNGARIAN PROFESSOR: An Englishman visits Hungary for the Olympics and meets a Professor who knows all about England and wants to practice his English and talk about all the sites in London. 4.25
  • THE STEAL: A tightly-budgeted couple takes a vacation and is forced to endure the overblown ramblings of an obnoxiously rich couple, up to and including the purchase of an oriental rug. 4.75
  • CHRISTINA ROSENTHAL: A strange story of a Jewish marathon runner and the gentile woman he fell in love with, and the strange stories of their love over time. 4.25
  • COLONEL BULLFROG: A Colonel becomes a POW in Asia shortly before the end of WWII and the strange relationship that develops between the captive and the captors. 4.00
  • DO NOT PASS GO: A political refugee resettles in America, but during a return flight to the area of his birth, his plane is forced to land in Iraq, where there is a bounty on his head. 3.50
  • CHUNNEL VISION: A strange tale of a man about to be dumped by his latest fling, where the woman runs up expensive charges at a restaurant where the man explains to an old friend a detailed plot of an upcoming novel. The old friend, also a novelist, is horrified as the plot is the plot of his latest best-seller, and the man doesn’t know. 4.00
  • DOUGIE MORTIMER’S RIGHT ARM: A story of rowers and the mysterious cast of the arm of one of the first rowers which keeps disappearing from the rower’s club. 3.75
  • CLEAN SWEEP IGNATIUS: A Nigerian Minister of Finance wants to cut out the heart of corruption and flys to Switzerland to get the names of the citizens in his country who have Swiss bank accounts. 4.00
  • NOT FOR SALE: An up-and-coming artist gets swept off her feet by a gallery owner who wines and dines her to finish some stunning paintings for her first showing, with initially tragic results. 4.00
  • ONE-NIGHT STAND: Two male friends are inseparable until they meet a woman that impresses both of them, despite each being already married, and they both pursue her with reckless abandon, cutting each other off in each attempt until one finally succeeds. Neat feminist twist. 4.50
  • A CHAPTER OF ACCIDENTS: An art hustler likes to borrow paintings and then return them, while at the same time picking up the nearest available wife for a turn around the studio. Burned twice, a gallery owner plots an act of terminal revenge. 4.00
  • CHECKMATE: An elaborate plan to trick a woman into bed revolves around a game of “strip”-chess. But the plan goes too well for a while, and then a final twist to set things right. 4.00
  • THE CENTURY: A sports tale of an elaborate cricket match of Herculean competition between two giants at Oxford and Cambridge. 3.50
  • JUST GOOD FRIENDS: A strange bar tale leading to a new companion for a recently-bruised male ego. 4.00
  • HENRY’S HICCUP: A rich man tries to hold on to his comfortable life despite the impact of the Great War in Europe. After the war, he’s disappointed to find privilege doesn’t return to the owner. 4.00
  • A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE: An upright (and uptight) businessman tries to export his business values to Mexico when he tries to get a construction contract. 4.50
  • TRIAL AND ERROR: More of a short novella than a short story, this is the tale of a man convicted of murder who hires the straightest arrow at Scotland Yard to find the corpse which he thinks is still walking around very much alive, and that his wife was in on the frame. 4.50
  • THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN: A publisher visits a club in NYC and grabs hold of a story of a backgammon championship from the 1930s and how a non-player apparently beat the world champion despite numerous setbacks that week. 4.50
  • À LA CARTE: A boy wants to follow his father’s footsteps working at a car factory, but his father makes him work for a year in London to see if he can find something more upwardly mobile, and he does: chef! 4.00
  • THE CHINESE STATUE: A man travels to China as a diplomat and is given a statue of some value by a peasant, and has to try and find a way to repay the debt. 4.50
  • THE WINE TASTER: A wine taster is challenged to a duel of palates by an unscrupulous rich upstart. 4.00
  • TIMEO DANAOS…: A bank branch manager with pretensions to grandeur takes his wife on a Mediterranean cruise, and she wants to buy a new dinner service. 4.00
  • NOT THE REAL THING: A strange combination of foreign governments, an engineer who helps rebuild their basic services, a woman with two suitors who marries the engineer, and the desire of the engineer to show up his now important former rival (despite the fact that the engineer won the girl). All in all, a story worthy of medals (a subplot of the story). 4.50
  • ONE MAN’S MEAT…: A story told in two parts. The first part is the intro — a man sees a beautiful woman entering a theatre, and finagles a seat next to her. Then, he asks her to dinner and the story diverges into four possible endings.
    • RARE: Everything goes perfectly, all too well in fact, and the ending is a depressing twist. 4.00
    • BURNT: The woman’s husband turns up, so the night is a bust and goes downhill from there. 4.25
    • OVERDONE: Everything goes horrible between the two, and the woman is basically a shrew and the meal feels like a battle scene. 4.00
    • À POINT: An amazing combination of optimism and lightheartedness that outshines the other three endings by far. 5.00

What I Didn’t Like

That there weren’t even more stories or that some of the really good ones weren’t longer!

The Bottom Line

An excellent collection.

Field of Thirteen by Dick Francis (1998) – BR00018 (2001) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
March 4 2001

Plot or Premise

A collection of thirteen short stories, eight of which were published previously in various magazines.

What I Liked

  • Dead on Red – A contract killer kills a jockey for another jockey, but the results are not quite what the surviving jockey had desired. (4.00/5.00)
  • Song for Mona – A snobbish daughter is ashamed of her mother’s life and history while others find her charming and praise her. (4.00/5.00)
  • Collision Course – An editor loses his job and runs into snobs who won’t let him park his boat at their restaurant while he has dinner with three publishers. Turns out the owner is a up-and-comer who needs to win an upcoming race in order to attract horses to his farm. An interesting battle develops. (4.00/5.00)
  • Carrot for a Chestnut – Fixing a race by doping the horse with a doctored carrot. With a great twist at the end. (3.50/5.00)
  • Blind Chance – A man has a perfect way to know the outcomes of photo-finish races, and to make money on it. Until disaster strikes. (4.00/5.00)
  • Corkscrew – An honest man is charged with a crime and his lawyer swindles his parents out of the bail money. He doesn’t count on the road to justice being long and windy. (3.75/5.00)
  • The Day of the Losers — Money from an old robbery is the glue that holds this story together as the police attempt to fix a race in order to catch a crook. There are twists all around at the end. (3.50/5.00)
  • Haig’s Death – All the people who have their fates resting on the outcome of a race are all affected when the decision falls to the judge, whose fate has already been decided. Multiple storylines all lead to a combined finish. (3.50/5.00)

What I Didn’t Like

  • Raid at Kingdom Hill – A bomb scare at the racetrack, and money goes missing during the chaos. (2.00/5.00)
  • Bright White Star – The theft of a horse from an auction and a wandering tramp who is displaced from his home on the land…includes a great set-up/intro though — “Write us a story,” they said. I asked, “What about?” “About three thousand words,” they replied. (2.00/5.00)
  • Nightmare – A horse thief is running from his past where his father was killed during a theft. (2.50/5.00)
  • The Gift – A down-and-out alcoholic journalist finds the horseracing story of the century, but may be too drunk to write it. (2.00/5.00)
  • Spring Fever – A woman falls in love with her jockey and is taken advantage of, at first. (2.50/5.00)

The Bottom Line

An average Francis collection.

Double or Nothing by Peter David (1999) – BR00026 (2001) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
March 4 2001

Plot or Premise

This is the fifth in the series about a vengeful attack on the universe by an “unknown” assailant who uses biological weapons to wipe out races in the Federation. This book puts Riker on the Excalibur, dealing with Shelby et al; Mackenzie on a secret undercover mission to infiltrate the assailant’s lair; and, Picard undercover to do the same thing, eventually linking up with Mackenzie.

What I Liked

There are a series of one-liners with Shelby and Riker that are occasionally funny, Mackenzie’s infiltration is really interesting at the start and his character is great, and there is an interesting interplay between Admirals at one point.

What I Didn’t Like

The Riker and Shelby section is not very well-written, Mackenzie’s infiltration becomes repetitive at the end, and when Picard and he link up, it makes little to no sense for most of it. However, my real problem with this story is the sequencing…up until now in the series, you haven’t known why the assailant is doing what he is doing, or even who it is. This one reveals all, and the motives are kind of a cliché. The New Frontier portion stays true to form while the rest of the interactions with The Next Generation universe is more of a caricature than reality.

The Bottom Line

Readable.