Category Archives: books

servant of the empire

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Servant Of The Empire (Empire Series #2) by Raymond E Feist and Janny Wurts

From Goodreads:

Second in Feist & Wurts’ wonderful epic trilogy — one of the most successful fantasy collaborations of all time THE EMPIRE TRILOGY: BOOK II Nobody knows how to play the Game of the Council better than Mara of the Acoma. But when you’re surrounded by deadly rivals intent on toppling you at every turn, you need to be the best simply to survive!

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I very much enjoyed returning to this series when I read the first installment back in February. It was hugely enjoyable but despite the 5star review I felt there was something missing and that I had enjoyed it more when I read it years ago. I put it down to a combination of rose-tinted glasses and changing tastes over the years.

However, picking up this book again made it clear to me that this series improves as you go through it. This is an epic story. The setting, the characters and the storylines are all amazing. It’s a perfect example of two authors collaborating to bring out the absolute best in each other.

No matter what I say I won’t be able to describe how good this book is or how much I enjoyed it. Just go and read it but make sure that you start at the beginning.

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grave secrets

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Grave Secrets (Temperance Brennan #5) by Kathy Reichs.

From Goodreads:

In the searing heat of Guatemala, Dr Temperance Brennan must harden herself against the horrors she excavates.

And then four young girls go missing from Guatemala City.

When a skeleton is found at the back of a rundown hotel, only someone with Tempe’s expertise can deduce the identity and cause of death.

But as she searches for answers, her path is blocked at every turn. It is clear that some people will stop at nothing to keep Guatemala’s secrets buried.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I really like the way the author changed the setting here. She managed to take Tempe to a very foreign country (don’t think I’ve read anything set in Central America before), introduce a probably unknown period of atrocity and genocide while still keeping the story familiar enough not to lose the reader.

I liked the new character of Galiano (basically a Guatemalan Ryan) and the depiction of the villagers at the site of the massacre. I would liked to have seen this side of the story further developed to investigate the historical murders rather more than the modern ones but I guess this also reflects the reluctance of the authorities to do anything more than brush over history and ignore what has happened.

A few plot holes and places where the story wanders a little bit but it definitely doesn’t spoil the overall book. It’s good to see momentum and originality staying strong at 5 books into the series.

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harlequin

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Harlequin (Grail Quest #1) by Bernard Cornwell

From Goodreads:

From New York Times bestselling author Bernard Cornwell, now available in paperback—the first book in the Grail Series–a spellbinding tale of a young man, a fearless archer, who sets out wanting to avenge his family’s honor and winds up on a quest for the Holy Grail.

At dawn on Easter morning 1343, a marauding band of French raiders arrives by boat to ambush the coastal English village of Hookton. To brave young Thomas, the only survivor, the horror of the attack is epitomized in the casual savagery of a particular black-clad knight, whose flag — three yellow hawks on a blue field — presides over the bloody affair. As the killers sail away, Thomas vows to avenge the murder of his townspeople and to recapture a holy treasure that the black knight stole from the church.

To do this, Thomas of Hookton must first make his way to France; So in 1343 he joins the army of King Edward III as it is about to invade the continent — the beginning of the Hundred Years War. A preternaturally gifted bowman, Thomas quickly becomes recognized as one of England’s most deadly archers in King Edward’s march across France. Yet he never stops scanning the horizon for his true enemy’s flag.

When Thomas saves a young Frenchwoman from a bloodthirsty crowd, her father — French nobleman Sir Guillaume d’Evecque — rewards his bravery by joining him in the hunt for the mysterious dark knight and the stolen holy relic. What begins as a search for vengeance will soon prove the beginning of an even higher purpose: the quest for the Holy Grail itself.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This is a superb book and I read it through in less than 2 days. It’s a completely original setting for me as I haven’t read anything from this time period. The quality is of the writing is among the very best I’ve read.

In all three things made this book for me. The first, as always, are the characters. There are a small number of main characters and a host of supporting minor characters but the author manages to make all of them stand out and be memorable. He gives just enough information to make them relatable without bogging the reader down with unnecessary detail. Thomas, despite the description above, is no knight on a quest and simply wants to fight and plunder while keeping himself and his friends alive. He’s the reluctant hero.

The second is the battle scenes. The setting is the start of the Hundred Years War with a mixture of seige fighting, knight cavalry charges and hand to hand fighting. This is definitely no romantic Arthurian chivalrous combat. It’s bloody, violent and very visceral. It’s about staying alive by killing as many of the enemy as possible and then taking what you can from the survivors. The author manages to find just the right balance between detail and not losing the reader in the complexity of the writing. I’ve seen him do that with some of the Last Kingdom battles but not here.

The third element for me is how he tells the story. We are dropped into the middle of the war and into Thomas’s life with no background or back story to work from. We gradually get to know him and his quest as the book progresses and keeping the mystery keeps the interest. He also blends the stories of Thomas, Sir Simon, Guillaume and Harlequin together in a very skilled way.

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a reason to kill

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A Reason to Kill (Jack Widow #3) by Scott Blade.

From Goodreads:

In Scott Blade’s #1 AMAZON bestselling series, Jack Widow hunts for a missing girl in a race against time that may give him more than one reason to kill.

Former Undercover NCIS cop, now Jack Widow is A Drifter. A Nobody. A Stranger. A Hero.

Jack Widow, the ultimate loner, waits to catch a bus at a Texas station to nowhere in particular. Seated across from him is an elderly woman, clearly in a state of distress. Eight hours ago, her own son, who just got out of prison, abducted her granddaughter and vanished.

Her son, James Hood, is mixed up with the wrong people–powerful people. The kind of people who will kill to protect a deadly secret. Terrified for her granddaughter’s life, she has no one left to trust.

With nowhere to turn, she follows their trail, on her own, toward a border town in South Texas.

After showing Widow a picture of her six-year-old granddaughter, Claire Hood drops dead of natural causes, right at the bus station, right in front of him.

Jack Widow isn’t the kind of guy to let wrongs go. He picks up her bus ticket and takes her place on a quest that will give him a reason to kill.

My Rating: ⭐⭐

I have no idea why I keep reading these. The characters are poorly developed, clichéd and the storylines really are terrible with a poor quality of writing that depends heavily on the much better original Reacher series by Lee Childs. I guess they’re like junk food for the brain, the reading equivalent of having dinner in McDonalds!

This also appears to be where the author decided to change characters and jump to the older Jack Widow instead of Cameron Reacher. At least Widow has life experience to justify his abilities and skills.

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taliesin

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Taliesin (The Pendragon Cycle #1) by Stephen Lawhead

From Goodreads:

It was a time of legend, when the last shadows of the mighty Roman conqueror faded from the captured Isle of Britain. While across a vast sea, bloody war shattered a peace that had flourished for two thousand years in the doomed kingdom of Atlantis.

Taliesin is the remarkable adventure of Charis, the Atlantean princess who escaped the terrible devastation of her homeland, and of the fabled seer and druid prince Taliesin, singer at the dawn of the age. It is the story of an incomparable love that joined two worlds amid the fires of chaos, and spawned the miracles of Merlin…and Arthur the king.

My Rating: ⭐⭐

This is yet another series that I read many years ago. I was reminded of it while reading the Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell. I remember being impressed with the author back then but having finished this I must have been thinking of his Song of Albion series instead.

This book was hard work. It started off well with two interesting plots developing on Atlantis and Celtic Britain. We get good storylines on Atlantean royal society as well as the Western Celts of Britain. However, it doesn’t last. The two storylines are dummed down considerably, character development becomes pretty non-existent and the two societies are rammed together to create a love story sadly lacking interest or originality.

Mixed in with this is a very self-righteous depiction of Christianity with religion being shoved down the reader’s throat as the only way forward. I found this increasingly annoying and unbelievable within the setting. In the end I was glad to get finished and really not sure if I want to be bothered trying the second one.

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never somewhere else

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Never Somewhere Else (DCI Lorimer #1) by Alex Gray

From Goodreads:

When a series of young women are discovered strangled and mutilated in a Glasgow park, it is up to DCI Lorimer to find their killer. He enlists the services of Dr Solomon Brightman, a psychologist and criminal profiler.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

A new author for me and this is her first published book. I came across her watching an RTE documentary about Marie Cassidy, the former State Pathologist. She is originally from Glasgow and friends with the author who appears in the show. She sounded a bit like Mo Hayder so I decided to give her a go.

Unfortunately this book is nothing like Mo Hayder and Lorimer is a pale shadow of Jack Caffrey! The book isn’t bad, it just isn’t good. There’s no depth to anything, no intriguing storyline and only a very shallow relationship with the characters. Simply put we don’t get to know them at all, even Lorimer who is supposed to be the lead.

There is a lot of potential with the characters and I do like the idea of the books being set in Glasgow for a change. I’ll give another couple a go before I decide to give up or not. She has written 17 books in the series and has received a number of awards so I’m expecting them to get better.

the cardinal of the kremlin

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The Cardinal of the Kremlin (Jack Ryan #4) by Tom Clancy.

From Goodreads:

In a rolling sea off the coast of South America, a target disappears in a puff of green light. In the Soviet hills of Dushanbe near the Afghanistan border, an otherworldly array of pillars and domes rises into the night. To the two greatest nations on earth, no contest is more urgent than the race to build the first Star Wars missile defense system, and no one knows that more than the two men charged with assessing the Soviets’ capabilities: Colonel Mikhail Filitov of the Soviet Union, an old-line warrior distrusted by the army’s new inner circle of technocrats, and CIA analyst Jack Ryan, hero of the Red October affair.

Each must use all his craft to arrive at the truth, but Filitov gets there first — and that’s when all hell breaks loose. Because Filitov, code-named Cardinal, is America’s highest agent in the Kremlin, and he is about to be betrayed to the KGB. His rescue could spell the difference between peace and war, and it is up to Jack Ryan to accomplish it — if he can — as, in a breathtaking sequence of hunter and hunted, Filitov’s life, and Ryan’s and that of the world itself literally hang in the balance.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I’ve been disappointed by many of the previous books in the series but this was very good. There is much more of a storyline and much less mind numbing technical and military detail. Altogether there are three strands to the story with a CIA, Russian and Afghan element. I would have liked to have seen more development of the Afghan storyline but it’s there for a plot line purpose and just serves that.

Refreshingly in this story Clancy spends much less time degrading Soviet society and highlighting its faults. It still comes across as a corrupt and faulty society both socially and politically but more as part of the story and not rammed in the reader’s face. Additionally, the book is chock full of strong characters and a good number of these are on the Soviet side this time. The most notable is the old war hero Misha but the young soldier Bondarenko and the KGB investigator Vatutin are also excellent characters. In many ways the Soviets are the stars of this book while Ryan himself is in more of a supporting role.

I also particularly enjoyed the espionage of the first half of the book. There is a great sense of pace and tension as well as a good insight into the operations of both the CIA and KGB spy networks, how the agents operated and how they passed along information while staying undetected. Considering the disappointment of Red Rabbit this was a much better and more enjoyable book.

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fool’s errand

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Fool’s Errand (Tawny Man #1) by Robin Hobb.

From Goodreads:

Fifteen years have passed since the end of the Red Ship War with the terrifying Outislanders. Since then, Fitz has wandered the world accompanied only by his wolf and Wit-partner, Nighteyes, finally settling in a tiny cottage as remote from Buckkeep and the Farseers as possible.

But lately the world has come crashing in again. The Witted are being persecuted because of their magical bonds with animals; and young Prince Dutiful has gone missing just before his crucial diplomatic wedding to an Outislander princess. Fitz’s assignment to fetch Dutiful back in time for the ceremony seems very much like a fool’s errand, but the dangers ahead could signal the end of the Farseer reign.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This is a fantastic return to Fitz’s story. The Farseer Trilogy, while very good, suffered at times from an overly complicated story that was far too wide ranging. This books strips away the complications and distills it down to a much simpler story.

Much of the book is given over to reacquainting us with Fitz’s life and what has happened to him in the 15 years since we last saw him. During this time he has travelled far and wide, has spent time with folk of the Old Blood and has cemented his relationship with Nighteyes. He has cut himself off from the political world of the Six Duchies but still stays connected via his Skill knowledge of Burrich, Molly and Nettle and his infrequent visits from Starling.

I found it very poignant that while his relationship with Nighteyes pretty much completed the two it was only when the Fool returned that they were truly “Pack” once more. There was a very subtle suggestion that they almost met in Bingtown with Fool in his Amber persona that was cleverly woven into his story of their travels but not picked up on any further.

Three things made this book for me:

  • the focus on Wit magic or Old Blood. This is a much more understandable and easily related type of magic than the Skill. It’s almost believable from a modern point of view. We all know someone that seems to have a special relationship with animals. In this book the author delves much more into the details of the Wit, explains how it works and develops the relationship between Fitz and Nighteyes, sometimes with difficult and heart breaking developments.
  • the Fool is given centre stage. His previous Farseer character was a clever subterfuge to hide his true importance but he was a difficult friend for Fitz to have. In this book he and Fitz are given time together to be themselves and to show their true friendship together. The time at the cabin is one of happiness and fun and I especially enjoyed the transformation of the cabin by the Fool’s almost compulsive carving and whittling. The eventual end of this time transformed him back into the flamboyant Lord Golden who has to be one of the best fantasy characters ever created. His antics and machinations are a joy to read when you know the true character behind the mask.
  • the development of Fitz. He is no longer the surly young man of the previous trilogy. He has grown up and accepted his role and how he was treated. He still carries his ghosts but in a much more mature way. His handling of his complicated relationship with Prince Dutiful and his new relationship with Chade is particularly good and it seems that happier times are also ahead for him.

I’m pretty sure that I have read this second trilogy in Fitz’s story but I can’t remember the other two books. This makes me anticipate reading them even more.

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expedition

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Expedition by Steve Backshall

From Audible:

Shine a light into the unknown.

There are still dark corners of our planet that are yet to be explored. In this remarkable book, Steve Backshall offers an unflinching account of his adventures into these uncharted territories around the globe, in search of world firsts. Each location brings its own epic challenges – whether it’s the first climb of an arctic ice fall in Greenland, the first recorded navigation of a South American river, or the first exploration of the world’s longest cave system in Mexico. But all of them represent new tests of the limits of human endeavour. 

Accompanying a major 10-part series on BBC and Dave, Expedition is a breathtaking journey into the unknown, and a brilliantly written celebration of the pleasures of genuine discovery.

My Rating: ⭐⭐

I had high hopes for this thinking that hearing the book narrated by Steve himself would bring a sense of authenticity to the story and the experiences within it. However, his constant, breathless excitement and constant over exaggeration of even the smallest happenings soon wore out. The quality of the writing is pretty poor and the narration does nothing to help it. He must have set a personal target to use every over the top metaphor possible and exaggerate every description to the nth degree. Nothing was just large, it was gigantic and so on with over descriptive depictions of scenery and conditions on a continual loop. Rather than create excitement it became bland and uninteresting.

I made it through 8 of the 10 expeditions and barely remember anything of them. I do believe that they were true adventures but trying to explore undiscovered places on the modern Earth is surprisingly uninteresting when described in this book. The book was also a BBC TV series and it was probably better in film than print.

A constant irritation was his references to his family, how much he was missing them and how guilty he was that his son was missing him at the very beginning of his life. In one freak kayak accident he almost dies in a rapid. His lamentations about the possible effect of his death made me quite angry. Why the hell expose himself to these dangers and choose to leave home on these extended expeditions if he was worried about the effect on his family! Selfishness of the highest order and absolutely no right to then complain about it.

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the shepherd’s crown

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The Shepherd’s Crown (Discworld #41, Tiffany Aching #5, Witches #11) by Terry Pratchett

From Goodreads:

A shivering of worlds.

Deep in the Chalk, something is stirring. The owls and the foxes can sense it, and Tiffany Aching feels it in her boots. An old enemy is gathering strength.

This is a time of endings and beginnings, old friends and new, a blurring of edges and a shifting of power. Now Tiffany stands between the light and the dark, the good and the bad.

As the fairy horde prepares for invasion, Tiffany must summon all the witches to stand with her. To protect the land. Her land.

There will be a reckoning…

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

This is not the usual Terry Pratchett story. While there are a number of asides of the usual humour there are very few laugh out loud moments. The overall atmosphere is sombre and one of impending bad news. The loss of one of the key Discworld figures as well as the understanding that this is the absolutely final TP book leaves the book and the reader with an overall feeling of sadness. As a character Tiffany finally becomes her own person, taking control of her own destiny but even her success is tinged with a level of sadness.

The quality of writing is not up to the usual standard, nor is the construction of the storyline. However, the afterword makes it clear that this was an unfinished manuscript and that TP would undoubtedly have made further changes and additions. For all of that it is a worthy read and a fitting epitaph. As the afterword states:

The Shepherd’s Crown has a beginning, a middle and an end, and all the bits in between.

I’ll leave the last word to Death….

WE ARE ALL FLOATING IN THE WINDS OF TIME. BUT YOUR CANDLE […] WILL FLICKER FOR SOME TIME BEFORE IT GOES OUT –A LITTLE REWARD FOR A LIFE WELL LIVED. FOR I CAN SEE THE BALANCE AND YOU HAVE LEFT THE WORLD MUCH BETTER THAN YOU FOUND IT, AND IF YOU ASK ME, said Death, NOBODY COULD DO ANY BETTER THAN THAT . . .

Terry Pratchett 1948-2015. Rest in Peace