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Category: 3 Stars

Review: Two thirds of the Last Policeman trilogy, Ben Winters

Note: I received review copies of The Last Policeman and Countdown City from the publisher, in exchange for an honest review. Important question if you have read the two existing books in the Last Policeman trilogy: Does the meteor actually hit the earth in the third book? Or do they find a way to avoid the impending disaster? I say it’s a cop-out if the meteor doesn’t strike. The Last Policeman is a series about a man who has always wanted to be a police detective. Just because there is a miles-long meteor heading straight for the Earth to destroy…

15 Comments

Review: Shards of Time, Lynn Flewelling

Note: I received this ebook from the publisher, via Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review. These days, I don’t read much high fantasy. It’s not that I’m ashamed of the many hours I spent reading Mercedes Lackey books in middle and high school; it’s just that I rarely, rarely feel like returning to that type of fantasy. But I’ve never been able to quit Lynn Flewelling. I looooved The Bone Doll’s Twin (you can always get me with gender stuff and a healthy dose of creepiness), and I get a kick out of seeing the Seregil and Alec doing…

6 Comments

Review: The Lucy Variations, Sara Zarr

Show of hands in the comments: Who played an instrument in their youth? What instrument and for how long? Why’d you start, and if you quit, why’d you quit and do you miss it? I had piano lessons for part of middle and high school. My second-grade teacher, who was really primarily a music teacher, came to my house once a week and taught me and Social Sister how to play. I was okay. I have big hands, so that was good, but I never had a really good feel for the way the music flows. If I were wealthy,…

19 Comments

Review: 26a, Diana Evans

Okay, it’s official. I have never, not ever, encountered a Nigerian or Nigerian-descended author who has never written about twins. If you have, drop a note in the comments. Twins are permanent residents of the Nigerian imagination. I like this fact. (In case you are not a podcast listener, Nigerians also have more twins. Than anyone else! We don’t know why, but it’s true, and it remains true even when IVF and other such things increase rates of multiple births in many Western countries.) 26a is about a family of four girls, daughters of a British father and a Nigerian…

25 Comments

Review: The Body Hunters, Sonia Shah

Somebody recommended The Body Hunters when I reviewed Bad Pharma earlier this year, and I’m pleased that I was able to get and read it so soon! The author, an investigative journalist, here examines the ethics of biomedical research — specifically, of American drug companies outsourcing clinical trials to companies with laxer ethical requirements than the US and large populations of sick patients to run tests on. It’s a fairly widespread practice that only gets wider-spread with each passing year. I am an inveterate note-checker in my nonfiction. I already sort of was to begin with, and then I read…

14 Comments

Review: Silence Once Begun, Jesse Ball

Note: I received this review copy from the publisher. This in no way influenced my review. A man named Oda Sotatsu signs a confession for a crime he did not commit: the disappearances of eight elderly men and women from a town in Japan. On the door of each disappeared person was found a single playing card, with no fingerprints. After signing his confession, Sotatsu says nothing either to defend or to further condemn himself. Jesse Ball, journalist, goes to Japan to try and discover the true story of Oda Sotatsu and the Narito Disappearances. Silence Once Begun is the…

10 Comments

Review: The Thief, Fuminori Nakamura

Not to be confused with Megan Whalen Turner’s book of the same title, although each depicts a clever theft by a protagonist unhappy in his circumstances. The beginning: There’s some weirdness about timelines, so I may have this wrong, but okay, there is a pickpocket who has returned to Tokyo although it is unsafe for him to do so. He formerly worked with another gifted thief named Ishikawa, and he now works alone. Reasons unclear, though there are hints that Ishikawa came to a Bad End. Oh, gosh, I hope there’s a crime syndicate! The end (spoilers in this section…

4 Comments

Review: The Devil’s Alphabet, Daryl Gregory

As mentioned in this space a few weeks ago, I was more excited by the first couple of chapters of Pandemonium than I have been by the first few chapters of any book I’ve read in a while. Naturally, I was excited to check out more of Gregory’s work. Like Pandemonium, The Devil’s Alphabet drew me in with its premise, but didn’t quite succeed in bringing the plot home. Okay. Here’s the premise. Bear with me for a bit. When Paxton was a kid, his town was hit with what’s now known as Transcription Divergence Syndrome, which killed some of…

11 Comments

Review: The Village, Nikita Lalwani

Less assured than Lalwani’s first book, Gifted, but still, an intriguing meditation on identity and the ethics of documentary film The beginning: A young British woman of Indian descent has been chosen by the BBC to film a documentary about a small village in India. The village houses about 48 families, and in each family, one member is a murderer. Ashwer is a prison without locks, a place for well-behaved convicts to live with their families and enjoy some degree of autonomy. In its years of operation, no prisoner has ever reoffended, and only one has ever attempted to escape.…

9 Comments

Review: Nexus, Ramez Naam

A while ago I accidentally checked out Crux, the second book in a series about a drug called Nexus that expands the human brain’s capacity and permits brains to connect directly to each other. Despite its turning out to be a sequel whose original I hadn’t read, I really liked it. Nexus is the book I meant to check out, so I went back and got that one the next time I was at the library. The beginning: A government agent called Samantha Cataranes has been sent to gather information about a science computer genius guy named Kaden Lane, who…

13 Comments