Sunday, September 4, 2011

Hard Evidence, Bad Boys in Black Tie and Blood Rock

Hard Evidence by Pamela Clare is the second in her I-team series, features Tessa Novak and FBI agent Julian Darcangelo.  I am reading this piecemeal because it is taking me awhile to retrieve all of the books in the series (and I was at the mercy of the local library which only had a few) so I started with Breaking Point (which has an eye-catching cover!).  These are great books with a bit of violence, hunky heroes, self-reliant heroines (the shooting lesson in this one brought back memories of my attempt to fire our gun at the shooting range which emphasized the fact that I have limp noodles for wrists when the ejected shell shot up and caught in between my glasses and my eye---fortunately I was not burned!).  Anyway, nice chemistry between the two characters, tough backgrounds that are overcome, great investigative work by Tessa (go researchers!). 

Bad Boys in Black Tie  is an anthology by Lori Foster, Erin McCarthy and Morgan Leigh.  The first two are favorite authors but I have not read Ms. Leigh's work (at least not that I am consciously remembering).  Maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind for these (I do go through periods of satiation with a particular genre) but none of them particularly grabbed me and made me root for the characters.  There are cute scenes in Ms. Foster's Good With His Hands but I found myself a bit irritated with the female lead, CJ White in Miss Extreme Congeniality.  I guess this goes back to my previous musings on achieving that spark...it is tough to resonate with everyone and probably even worse when one is limited to a certain number of words.

Blood Rock is by Anthony Francis, a new-to-me author.  It starts with a bang and the action never seems to abate, which is both good and bad.  Very imaginative blending of paranormal creatures such as vampires and were-people with magicians that utilize tattoos or graffiti.  Having neglected to read the first book, there is a bit of backstory and debts and obligations that interconnect many of the characters and the love life of the main character, Dakota Frost, is disturbing to me on several levels (which has nothing to do with her gender selections).  I was a little shocked to read some of the reviews on Amazon accusing the author of unsavory things and I think that people need to deal with their own issues and stop projecting.  This is a great book, just a little dense in terms of characters and politics and the constant killing is not to my tastes.  Interesting twists, especially a weretiger with Tourette's syndrome and the somewhat sentient graffiti but a little dark for me.

No comments:

Post a Comment