GUEST REVIEW and GIVEAWAY: Debunk It! by John Grant

Publisher: Zest Books 
Format Read: Paperback
Source: the publisher in exchange for an honest review
Release Date: February 24, 2015
Buying Links: Amazon* | Book Depository* | OmniLit* | Barnes & Noble | Kobo
* affiliate links; the blog receives a small commission from purchases made through these links.

Blurb from tour kit:

We live in an era of misinformation, much of it spread by authority figures like broadcasters, politicians, and religious leaders. (The various pundits on blogs and websites don’t help either.) With so much bogus information from so many sources, how can anyone be expected to discover the truth?

In Debunk It!, author John Grant uses modern, ripped-from-the-headlines examples to clearly explain how to identify bad evidence and dismantle poor arguments. He provides a roundup of the rhetorical tricks people use when attempting to pull the wool over our eyes, and even offers advice about how to take these unscrupulous pundits down. So if you’re tired of hearing blowhards spouting off about climate change, history, evolution, medicine, and more, this is the book for you. Debunk It! is the ultimate guide for readers seeking a firmer footing in this very slippery world.

GIVEAWAY! Better Homes and Hauntings by Molly Harper

Thanks to friend and former reviewer Liz, I have a print copy of Molly Harper's newest release, "Better Homes and Hauntings", to give away. It's for US residents only. Enter using the rafflecopter below. Please read the Giveway Policy.

 

Author of the beloved Half Moon Hollow series of vampire romances (Nice Girls Don’t Have Fangs), Molly Harper has created a standalone paranormal romance in which a dilapidated haunted house could bring star-crossed lovers together—if it doesn’t kill them first!

When Nina Linden is hired to landscape a private island off the New England coast, she sees it as her chance to rebuild her failing business after being cheated by her unscrupulous ex. She never expects that her new client, software mogul Deacon Whitney, would see more in her than just a talented gardener. Deacon has paid top dollar to the crews he’s hired to renovate the desolate Whitney estate—he had to, because the bumps, thumps, and unexplained sightings of ghostly figures in nineteenth-century dress are driving workers away faster than he can say “Boo.”

But Nina shows no signs of being scared away, even as she experiences some unnerving apparitions herself. And as the two of them work closely together to restore the mansion’s faded glory, Deacon realizes that he’s found someone who doesn’t seem to like his fortune more than himself—while Nina may have finally found the one man she can trust with her bruised and battered heart.

But something on the island doesn’t believe in true love…and if Nina and Deacon can’t figure out how to put these angry spirits to rest, their own love doesn’t stand a ghost of a chance.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

Review of Too Wicked To Wed by Cara Elliott

Publisher: Forever
Release Date: November 1st, 2011
Series: Lords of Midnight
Buying Links: Amazon     The Book Depository
Teaser: All the more reason to gamble at cards:
Her cousin's face took on a greenish cast.  "Be reasonable, Alexa!"

"Why should I?" she shot back.

"B-because it's..." Taken about by the unexpected resistance, Henry was reduced to an incoherent sputtering.  Raking a hand through his hair, he finally gathered enough courage to blurt out the truth. "Bloody hell, Alexa.  The pledge happens to be half-ownership in a gaming hell and brothel!"

Reviewed By: Liz

Book Blurb (from Goodreads):

Outspoken and independent, Lady Alexa Bingham enjoys the heady freedom of making all her own decisions, even though the challenges of overseeing her family's country estate are daunting. But when a chance encounter with London's most notorious rake awakens a secret longing for adventure, she accepts her aunt's invitation for a Season in Town . . . only to find that breaking the rules of the ton has serious consequences.

The Earl of Killingworth uses his rakehell reputation to hide the fact that poverty has forced him to work for a living. As the owner of a gambling den and brothel, Connor has no time for glittering ballrooms or innocent young ladies. But after a reckless wager leaves him with a new business partner, he is forced to take a risky gamble . . . Will the cards fall in their favor?Alexa and Connor begin to play a dangerous game of intrigue and deception as they seek to outwit a cunning adversary who wants to put them permanently out of business. But if they are not careful, it is the flames of their own fiery attraction that may destroy them. 

My Thoughts:


Okay ladies, lets be honest: we're not looking for groundbreaking in this genre.  We're looking for feel good with some smexy and, if we're lucky, witty banter.  Cara Elliott delivers in this book.

There's card playing, cross dressing, naughty etchings, and steamy kisses.  That's just Lady Alexa Hendrie in the first few chapters, it stays good the whole book.  The heroine doesn't take any MENSA prizes, but it's a period novel, she's risque enough for the time period by making decisions beyond what she's having for breakfast.  She's not a simpering moron and you feel that from the start.  She does have a few scenes where I wanted to smack some sense into her, but I've been watching Holmes with my mom since before I understood what they were talking about.  Lady Alexa is a fun character.

Lord Killingworth (really?), Connor Linsley, is a bit formulaic, but it's the beginning of the series, so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.  He's a veteran of the Peninsular wars with a nickname.  A bad one that the author tries to work in sporadically in a manner that feels a bit forced, along with his reputation.  I think she could have left out all of that "Wolfhound" nonsense and still had a perfectly good book.  He's an interesting character, and some thought was obviously put into him and his background.  His proposal made me want to smack him upside the back of his head.  Repeatedly.  So he was pretty true to the time period in that regard.

This fun little read was a 'who-dun-it', so I got to mentally (mostly) yell at the characters 3/4 of the way through.  So I enjoyed it. ;)  The book makes it obvious to the reader who the culprit is without making the final reveal tedious, which I appreciate since I'm the type that likes to read the last chapter if I don't get the answer half way through the mystery.  The couple gets help from the two other rakes (also given nicknames from dog breeds) from Earl Killingworth's regiment through out the novel, sometimes to the Earls detriment.

The smexy time scene was kinda steamy, and at no point did I stop and say "he did what?  But he just had his hands... wait, maybe I misread something?" like I do with a lot of romance novels.   I like my action (smexy and fighting) to make sense when I'm in the grip of the scene, and this one does.  The teasers leading up to it were fun, too.  

I'm looking forward to reading the rest of this series, and seeing what she does with the other 'hounds' from this novel.  The "Lords of Midnight" series title leads me to expect great things from the other hounds and their mates.  I hope that you all enjoy this book as much as I did.


The reviewer received this book from the publisher.

Liz Reviews The Bride Wore Black Leather by Simon R Green

Publisher: Ace
Release Date: January 3, 2012
Series: Nightside #12

Buying Links: Amazon     The Book Depository

Book Blurb (from goodreads):

John Taylor is marrying the love of his life, Suzie Shooter, the Nightside’s most fearsome bounty hunter. But before he can walk down the aisle he has one more case to solve as a private eye — a case that has him on the run from friends and enemies both, with his bride-to-be looking to collect the bounty on his head...

Reviewed By: Liz

My Thoughts:

Simon R. Green is best known for the Deathstalker series, but he also writes a lovely detective noir series call Nightside. I admit that I prefer this since he lets loose his sense of humor and the absurd within a rational story frame. It’s the Dresden Files with a healthy dose of Disc World thrown in to keep it from being too dry. “Do you need me to remind you that the last butler who annoyed me got dragged down to Hell?”


Green manages to write a character that stays true to type without giving off the recycled feeling you can get from such a well explored genre. There are some obvious witticisms and jokes, but you don’t often get the opportunity to use lines like “Someone did try to explain it to me once, but I fell asleep the moment they used the word quantum, in self-defense.”


This time the Nightside is under attack from a temporally displaced leader of the Hippie movement who’s got more in his bag of tricks than a little peyote. The Sun King is back from communing with Entities and not happy that the Summer of Love faded into memory while he was gone, and the Dream of the ‘60’s went unrealized. He’s back and he has the power to change the world, unfortunately for him there are a lot of beings that like it the way it is. This includes PI Jon Taylor, the new Walker, and groom to be.


This book has it all gods, ghouls, existential beings that can talk you into questioning yourself out of existence, and sentient objects. It even has irreverent Londoners with shot guns and liquor. Alternate dimensions and micro universes give the story a lot more flexibility than one would expect in such a short novel, and all of it easy to follow. After all why NOT have a sub dimension just for your graveyard? There is even a wedding. “…it does fall to me as your oldest friend and foe and occasional legal advisor to guide you through the horrors to come as you embark on the stormy seas of matrimony.”


There are a lot of really well written chase and fight scenes, a Who-Dun-It, delicious detective work, gods, Powers, undead, murderous friends, extra dimensional beings, and one particularly annoying sentient elevator between Jon and his wedding. I also give him extra points for using defenestration. This was a ridiculously fun book to read, and, like all of his Nightside novels, with just a few hundred pages it shouldn’t be intimidating to those with limited time for reading. It is part of a series, but please don’t be afraid to pick it up independently.

I received a hardcover from the publisher for review.

Change in Review Requests

From the blog My Mercurial Nature

I did an image search for piles of books and this one caught my eye. I hadn't seen this poem before but I like it very much. It's quite apt, for myself, and for Liz and Jax. If you don't have a magnifying glass handy to read the poem with, it says this:

Books to the ceiling, books to the sky,

My piles of books are a mile high.

How I love them!

How I need them!

I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

Arnold Lobel

Liz, Jax, and I are all busy, with reviews that we have accepted and with life stuff. I've decided to close the blog temporarily to new requests. We are starting to get snowed under and currently are running about two months out for reviews. When we've caught up, and caught our breath, the blog will re-open to new review requests. For publicists and blog tour companies that we are currently working with, we will still consider new requests as time, and our sanity, permits.

We will still do the occasional interview and some guest posts and book spotlights so feel free to email us about those. If we said we're reviewing your book, it's coming! I apologize for any delays. Thanks for your understanding.

Review of In Memories We Fear by Barb Hendee

Publisher: Roc
Release date: October 4, 2011

Series: Vampire Memories #4
Buying Links: Amazon    The Book Depository


Reviewed By: Liz

Book Blurb: 

*MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR EARLIER BOOKS*
 

Eleisha Clevon lives a quiet life in Portland, Oregon — for a vampire. She has learned to feed without killing humans and to train others of her kind. Along with her protector, Philip Branté, and their human companion, Wade Sheffield, she seeks out other vampires to offer them a community and to show them they do not have to exist alone. 

 Now, a series of killings in England point to a new — and feral — vampire. Eleisha, Philip, and Wade travel to London to make contact with the terrified creature, to offer him sanctuary and stop the bloodshed. But the vampire they find is not what they expected. Maxim is centuries old, with no memory of living anywhere besides the forest and feeding on animals. Now, he’s gained a taste for human blood. Philip thinks he’s too dangerous to save, but Eleisha won’t give up... even at the cost of Philip’s love and her own life.

My Thoughts: 

*MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR EARLIER BOOKS*

This is the fourth in the Vampire Memories series, and another well written book by an author that I enjoy reading.  I enjoyed the book, reading it was a pleasure.  This installation scratched a few well timed plot itches, and made me go ‘squee’ a time or two.  I love that she didn’t make them oversexed misunderstood eternal good guys.  That shtick got old fast for me. She has a couple good lines that jump out at me.  Talking about watching Hitchcock for the first time: "If the word 'artistic' came out of her mouth even once, he would revolt."  It was kinda corny and made me smile. 

Here comes the big ‘but’… BUT there was something niggling the back of my mind when I was reading this book.  So much so that I put it down and didn’t pick it back up for over a week while I tried to figure it out.  It wasn’t until I finished the novel that it walked up behind me with the 2x4 and one heck of a swing.   Now I might be over thinking this but it bugged me.  It was, in fact, just about the only thing that I didn’t enjoy about this book, and I suspect that’s why I didn’t just shrug it off.  It’s like putting a screen door on the most advanced submarine in history, a glaring oversight.

 Here’s the deal for those of you who haven’t read this series yet; the vampires are psychic.  Nothing groundbreaking or terribly exciting, I admit for those of you hiding yawns, but they can share memories.  I had no problem with this as she introduces a telepathic human as a main character in the very first novel.  My problem lies with this sheltered vampire, Eleisha, using a recently awakened memory sharing ability without any noticeable side effects except difficulty pulling out of the flow their memories.  Essentially she’s stuck in their memories.  By this book she has roughly a thousand years of FIRST PERSON memories straight from other people’s heads and no difficulty processing it or separating her memories from theirs.  I have trouble pulling myself out of a character’s head after one novel, much less experiencing their every thought and movement first hand.  This made it difficult to enjoy a well written and otherwise perfectly useful plot device.

With that one (huge to me) issue noted I want to reiterate that I really enjoyed this novel, and if you are thinking “meh, no biggy I can deal with that” then please read this book! 

I received a paperback from the publisher for review. 

Review: Noah Zark: Mammoth Trouble by D. Robert Pease

• Publisher: Walking Stick Books 
• Release Date: August 13, 2011
• Series: #1 Noah Zarc
• Buying Link: Amazon    Barnes & Noble
•  
• Book Blurb:
• Noah lives for piloting spaceships through time, dodging killer robots and saving Earth’s animals from extinction. Life couldn’t be better. However, the twelve-year-old time traveler soon learns it could be a whole lot worse. His mom is abducted and taken to thirty-first century Mars; his dad becomes stranded in the Ice Age; and Noah is attacked at every turn by a foe bent on destroying a newly habitable, post apocalyptic Earth.
  
  Traveling through time in the family’s immense spaceship, Noah, a paraplegic from birth, must somehow care for the thousands of animals on board, while finding a way to rescue his parents. Along the way, he discovers his mother and father aren’t who he thought they were, and there is strength inside him he didn’t know he had.

My Thoughts:

I’ve read a lot of YA novels and often found myself unable to relate to the drama they seem to    feel over every little thing. 

That never happened in this book. It’s a beautifully written YA Sci-Fi novel which seems to hit most of the standard archetypes without coming off as stale or trite. I was worried that this would be a religious book in Sci-Fi disguise, but it thankfully never happened. This book starts off with a bang and while it’s pace slows down after the initial attention grabber, but it never feels slow. There are fun Sci-Fi toys, sibling rivalry, parent issues, historic and current animal info, space and time travel, fights, and a light taste of romance. This book never left me saying ‘yes, but get on with the plot’ despite plenty of dialog, descriptions, and explanations. The character interactions are realistic, logical, and likely with one exception. That exception is the relation between the main character, his parents and the antagonist. I found that a little difficult to swallow, but that could be because I am over twice the target audience’s age. I would definitely recommend this novel to anyone in a preteen/young teen target audience with a taste for science fiction.

I felt that there could be more detail, a compliment since I don’t expect the level that I want as an adult in a YA novel. I thought the author did a wonderful job with this book and I’m waiting to see if this becomes a series. 

The reviewer, Liz, received a ePUB from the author for review.