Pros: Over-the-top thrill-ride through intense characters, epic legends, and plenty of deadly action
Cons: Over the top; both of the main female leads needing to be “saved” by the guy
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Review book courtesy of Harper-Collins
The Doomsday Key
Pros: Delightful, delicious, and oh-so-seasonal!
Cons: None so far!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Review book (published 2010) provided courtesy of Chronicle Books.
Farmers’ markets can be delightful places, filled with ripe, seasonal fruits and vegetables, as well as things like honey, maple syrup, fresh eggs, milk, and dairy. If you have one near you, you’ve probably meant to take advantage of it more than you actually have. If so, grab a copy of Jennie Schacht’s Farmers’ Market Desserts
Pros: Wow. What a complex web of themes, plots, characters, secrets, and intrigue.
Cons: Sometimes a little too coy about hinting at things to come.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Review book courtesy of Penguin Group
Betsy Treading has spent the last 12 years in jail for murder. Now DNA evidence has proven her innocence of the crime—but that isn’t the same as being innocent in the eyes of her neighbors, the people who failed to stand up for her when the crime was committed. Of course, it doesn’t help that even Betsy thought she’d committed the crime while sleepwalking, and can’t remember anything of that night.
Now Betsy is staying with her one-time neighbors, Marianne and Roland, who have their own secrets to hide. She’s reexamining her relationship with her now ex-husband, Paul, and his childhood friend, Geoffrey, an author who shared with her a great love of books. She knows that the only way she’ll ever be truly free of the shadow of suspicion is to find out what really happened that night… and her old suburban neighborhood with its carefully identical houses has more than its share of secrets to hide.
Pros: A more old-school take on vampires; intriguing strains of Lovecraftian horrors; unusual historical setting for a paranormal
Cons: A few oddities (a French poem rhymes in English?) and a couple of dry passages
Rating: 4 out of 5
Review book (uncorrected proof) courtesy of Grand Central Publishing
Expected publication date: November 2010
Vampires have become kindler and gentler these days. The curse of thirsting for blood and giving in to the desire to rend and kill has all but vanished. Even little worries like getting burned to ash by sunlight have faded to mere annoyances. Thus, it was with great joy that I discovered that Jeremiah Fall, the vampire protagonist of Stefan Petrucha’s Blood Prophecy
Fall was a Puritan farmer until he and his family accidentally uncovered the prison of a sleeping beast—a beast that killed Fall’s family and turned him into a monster. Fall has retained enough of his moral and religious bent to desperately want salvation, and when a whisper of a rumor of a cure surfaces, he sets off in single-minded pursuit. That pursuit will cause him to take up the mantle of a soldier of fortune, and leads him to Egypt during Napoleon’s wars. There he finds a mystical stone that might contain the cure he’s looking for, or could doom all of mankind. There he finds a woman he begins to love. And there he finds the birthplace of all mankind.
Pros: Beautiful, emotionally nuanced setting and characters.
Cons: I didn’t always feel like I had enough context to fully understand what was going on.
Rating: 4.75 out of 5
Review book courtesy of Penguin Group
Warned by the fates of an impending disaster, Freya embarks on a dangerous journey deep into the mountains to find a magnificent gold necklace said to have the power to alter the course of history. Meanwhile, the country is on the brink of war as the new world order of Christianity threatens the old ways of Iceland’s people,and tangled amid it all are two star-crossed lovers whose destiny draws them together – even as their families are determined to tear them apart.
Betsy Tobin’s Ice Land: A Novel
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