Tag Archives: stand-alone

The Burglar by Thomas Perry (2019) – BR00161 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
July 10 2019

Plot or Premise

Elle is an old-fashioned cat burglar with updated methods to tell her when houses with valuables are likely to be sitting empty. And she happily liberates them, feeling no remorse because the people are rich and she mainly takes things that are insured. Cash, jewels, guns. Which is all fun and games until she walks into the master bedroom at an empty house and finds three dead people sharing a bed after sharing each other.

What I Liked

The initial premise is strong, and watching her case, enter and rob houses is exciting. The initial twist is that the murders were accidentally recorded on a nearby camera, and Elle has to steal it to wipe the memory of her entrance. Her sense of ethics requires her to edit the footage to remove herself and then return the camera before the police find the bodies. But somehow the killers are looking for her, they know she was there and maybe saw too much.

What I Didn’t Like

Elle is supposed to be young, hip, and in the criminal underworld…and then spends more than half the book thinking the rough crowd in suits following her are probably cops, even after it is clear there is only one group looking for her, not two, and somebody killed her friend and the friend’s boyfriend. Everything about them screams mercenaries / ex-military even down to their office location, but nope, she keeps thinking they might be cops. Right up until she sees them shoot two people. A little slow on the uptake. In the middle of the “case”, a hit man comes after her, but rather than kill her as he is supposed to do, he plays with her for days trying to get her alone. Which he could have done by force ANY day and moved on. Whatever. She then turns into super sleuth to ferret out who they are, document all the evidence she’ll need to turn over to the police (i.e., days of surveillance and note-taking). At the end, the entire motive for everything is revealed in page after page of exposition, just dumped on the page by the bad guy which she conveniently records. And then it ends with only the barest of explanations of what happens to people, and her looking for work after getting out of the burglary game. Like maybe being a private investigator in a sequel, perhaps? While dating a new boyfriend she didn’t even really like. 

The Bottom Line

Love Perry but this is not his best work.

The Lolly-Madonna War by Sue Grafton (1969) – BR00160 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
May 22 2019

Plot or Premise

I loved Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series, and since I’m a bit of a “completist”, once I like an author’s books, I try to read everything by them. Although it was made into a movie, this book has been long out of print. Which made no real sense…how could a book written by an author as prolific and popular as Sue Grafton, and that was made into a movie, not be available ANYWHERE? Now that I’ve read it, I can see why. Like Keziah Dane, one of her earlier books, the characters are dirt poor backwoods families. Isolated from town, this story takes place entirely on the properties between two neighbouring families. If you have ever heard of the old Hatfields and McCoys feud of two warring families, fighting for reasons they no longer remember, you have the Lolly Madonna War.

What I Liked

The book picks up mid-war with the latest skirmish. The one family, the Gutshalls, has let slip to the other family that there is a girl coming to their house, a girl named Lolly-Madonna who will be a potential mate for one of the sons. Except it is entirely fictitious. Until the second family, the Feathers, sees a girl hiking along the road and decides it must be Lolly Madonna and therefore kidnap her to get back at the Gutshalls, depriving them of their prize. The girl protests, but to no avail. The war escalates with incursions on each other’s territory, shots fired, stills overturned, pigs slaughtered. And a budding romance with the girl.

What I Didn’t Like

The story is incredibly depressing from start to finish. With a giant plot-hole right in the middle…three of the kids are still friendly and talk occasionally, pretending to fight when they need to but not doing any real harm to each other. And when the Feathers tell their Gutshall friend that they have Lolly Madonna, he doesn’t say, “But we made it up”. It would have ended the story. Instead, he decides to say nothing, tell his parents, and they get it in their head to say nothing but maybe they should rescue her. Just as an excuse to keep the feud going…if one does something, even in retaliation, the other has to respond. And the ending is beyond depressing, not to mention you don’t really “see” the ending, you just turn the page and find out how it all ended.

The Bottom Line

There’s a reason this is out of print.

The Holland Suggestions by John Dunning (2014) – BR00158 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
April 12 2019

Plot or Premise

A man receives a photograph in the mail and starts having weird dreams and compulsions to go to the spot in the photo, even though he has never been there.

What I Liked

The story has some interesting elements — a mysterious past dealing with hypnosis, suggestion, regression, etc. Equally, he’s a man trying to “recover” his life a bit, as his daughter starts to push back wanting to know more about her absent mother. Finally, there are rumours of “gold in them there hills”, stories of old wars, native tribes, miners, and tunnels. He is searching for a treasure that he feels compelled to find, but he doesn’t know why.

What I Didn’t Like

There are hints in a few places that are partly about memory, or perhaps even past lives, and as such, it seems like they’re about to reveal that he’s the reincarnated version of someone. I probably would have thrown the book across the room for the cheesiness if it had, but there are other parts that are almost as bad — a finale with a series of weird action scenes that don’t fit the characters, interactions with individuals that should be more compelling and urgent yet instead come off as “wait and see”, and false and inaccurate tensions with snow storms.

The Bottom Line

Love John Dunning’s prose, but not as good as his book mysteries.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (2006) – BR00152 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
April 2 2019

Plot or Premise

A young girl uses stolen books to distract herself from the reality of living in Nazi Germany in WWII while hiding a Jewish man in her basement.

What I Liked

It is incredibly difficult to know how to review this book. The second half moves along at a much quicker pace and with much higher stakes. The book is narrated by Death / Grim Reaper, and the chapter headings give glimpses of what is to come. There are some red herrings near the end, implying one ending while leading to another, but overall it is pretty solid. The characters are lively, the girl is outstanding, and there are glimpses of her family that offer rare moments of joy and love. And it moved me to tears at the end.

What I Didn’t Like

It is hard to accept the implied message that “most Germans were good / nice”, it was just the Nazis that were bad people. And even the storyline written by the Jewish man in the basement is that it is all because of the Fuhrer, that Hitler is the only truly evil one. There are parts of it that read like almost an apology for Nazism rather than a sense of accountability for the nation’s deeds. The extra materials at the end tell how the author was inspired by his grandparents’ accounts of the ordinariness (in some ways) of the war in Germany for Germans – something that happened around them, or to them, not committed by them. In terms of the writing, the first half is a bit slow and dull, and the constant foreshadowing is repetitive and annoying at the start, less so at the end. The caricature of the mother is ridiculous; she only becomes human near the end. Finally, and this is a bit of a spoiler, the story ends rather abruptly, leaving out a huge opportunity to tell some more story. I know this book is aimed at teens and is hugely popular, but I would not wants someone relying on this book as their only source of history.

The Bottom Line

Solid read, not sure about the message.

The Two-Night One-Night Stand by Ryan Ringbloom (2018) – BR00126 (2019) – 🐸⚪⚪⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
January 27 2019

Plot or Premise

A case of mistaken identity on a blind date leads to a one-night stand.

What I Liked

I don’t normally read romance or romcom, but I grabbed this off Kindle Unlimited because it was free, it sounded like it could be funny, and the initial question of the story — can you turn a one-night stand into a dating partner? — had some great potential. How do you go from sex without strings to a potential relationship?

What I Didn’t Like

The writing is lacklustre, the sexual escapades beyond unrealistic (neither very experienced but both are supposedly MIND-BLOWING in bed — it actually contains the line that he has ruined her for other men), and the characters more stupid than immature. Plus completely inconsistent — hesitant, unsure of themselves, constantly letting their personal squirrels mess with their heads until they’re drunk out of their minds, having sex, etc., and then they suddenly become confident porn stars. And there were only two scenes that were even humourous, with neither rising to funny.

The Bottom Line

More failed romance novel than RomCom