Tag: fiction

Gone Before Goodbye by by Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I knew it will be a tough book to read because it had bad reviews. It wasn’t easy but wasn’t too bad either.

Alexander Belyaev has a story about a man who is essentially dead but his head is attached to a machine and is still talking. The head is waiting for a compatible headless body so it can be reattached. The story is called Professor Dowell’s Head. You would expect that Gone Before Goodbye is a crime mystery thriller, where we are trying to figure out what happened to the missing person (who’s gone). But it is, in reality, something similar to Belyaev’s stray head.

The book is very well written in most parts, and well translated too. The first 100 pages were excellent; then chaos set in. Maggie, a surgeon who lost her license, is offered redemption if she performs a difficult and illegal surgery. Once she accepts and sells her soul to the devil, people start flying around the globe like there’s no tomorrow and for no clear reason. Perhaps to show off how rich they are.

The resolution is like the head I mentioned. It’s sci-fi and ridiculous. We also have an avatar, living inside a phone, a common trope in present-day sci-fi. These AIs are usually demigods, who can do everything, and so is Maggie’s AI app. Also ridiculous.

Why three stars and not four, for example? Because it is never really clear why anything really happens. The book contains all kinds of cataclysmic and dramatic moments, and not a single one of them is actually necessary for the story. The explanation for everything is that a head is trying to find a body. Characters fly to Russia, billionaire balls are held, some people chase others, while committing grand acts of bravery without any relation to this problem. It’s not exactly a head but you’ll see if you read it. So I felt a disconnect between the great writing style, nice characters, the grandiose scenes, and setup, and the missing link to the actual story.

I could have given it two stars as well because of the publisher’s decision to compact the 350-page book into 300 pages by making the letters tiny and squeezing the letter spacing.

Despite the review, I enjoyed the individual fragments of good writing. 3/5 because of that.

Fleet of the Damned by Chris Bunch and Allan Cole

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

The resourceful captain Sten joins the navy and leads a small group of spaceships in the battle against the Tahn. The genre is a retro space opera with dumb computers and ships that need hundreds of people to be operated.

The story takes a sharp turn from what we saw in the previous three. It is not light anymore, not fun. It’s also not clear where we are heading. Things get from bad to worse with no improvement possible in sight. The problems presented are interesting, relevant, and engaging. The level of action reminds of Ender’s Game but unlike that book, the characters are not juvenile or cringe. It is very intense.

On a philosophical note, the Empire is ruled by an immortal emperor who controls the space fuel, an antimatter molecule that powers the spaceships. This leads to all kinds of bizarre negative consequences that we can see around us in areas where one person or a small group of people keeps monopoly over something. Emperor’s behavior is in a sense similar to what se see from the aging dictators of the modern age, like Xi or Putin, caught discussing plans to live forever, while also slowly losing their minds.

The book was written before the personal computer era really took off. It aged well. It’s not too realistic because Sten shouldn’t have survived half of the action but it got me. Clear 5*/5 and probably the best of the series until this moment.

Adrian Tchaikovsky in Sofia

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

I made it to the book signing with Adrian and got my copy of Children of Ruin signed. Big thanks to the publisher for putting these events together, helps a book blogger gain some good memories, photos, and posts.

The event kicked off with a panel exploring just how alien aliens can be, which was fun and thought-provoking. What would a spider say to a human if the spider communicates by pulling strings? Why haven’t you all read Octavia Butler?After that, we had a short game, a Q&A session, and finally the signing itself.

I’m really glad I got the chance to attend. It was memorable!

Nightshade by Michael Connelly, Book Review

~ Veselin ~ 6 Comments

Michael Connelly is one of my favorite crime/thriller authors. I’ve read almost everything he’s written (probably everything but I’m not sure about one book). He is producing high quality books pretty consistently. However, he has flops. Nightshade is one of the books I did not like.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been moved to Catalina Island, after a series of questionable life choices. Within the book, he has three tasks:

  • Investigate the murder of a protected buffalo
  • Get statements from some suspicious character who hit a police officer with a bottle
  • Keep his partner Natasha happy

This is not what he does, so in a sense, he continues with the questionable life choices and is surprising that the police didn’t transfer him to the North Pole. He jumps in to investigate a murder, and of course, one murder leads to another, so there are many murders.

Had the killer or the multiple killers stayed put, none of the book would’ve happened as Detective Stilwell’s entire game is to find clues in the exceptional overreaction by the suspects, giving them away over and over. Remove that and there’s no book. The original clues get compromised or are mostly ignored by the detective. For example, the body found in the beginning of the book – the book itself makes it very clear the first body should’ve been found elsewhere or never found.

Now, Natasha. Detective Stilwell is in love, according to the pages. He will manipulate, lie to, and ignore Natasha “Tash” Dano over and over. His treatment towards her is reckless, irresponsible, and borderline abusive. Although it is completely fine to describe an abusive relationship in a fiction book, the term for what we see is fridging. Fridging is when a character is introduced for the sole purpose of being killed and placed in a fridge, so the detective has business to do. I felt that the female protagonist only exists to increase the difficulty level to Detective Stillwell. The character development for her felt superficial but it is like that for the rest of the characters as well, except maybe the main victim, whose life and dreams we’ll explore in greater depths.

The best part of the book is the cover. It is beautiful and was one of the reasons to read it last week.

I rated Nightshade with 2*/5. One of the stars is a bonus for the cover and the whole Catalina idea. The content is perhaps the worst I’ve read by Michael Connelly.

Frieda Klein

~ Veselin ~ 3 Comments

I’m reading the series about Frieda Klein by Nicci French.

It’s a series of 8 books, 7 named after days of week, and one final. Frieda is a psychologist with a medical degree who always has a murder case to solve. She has the persistence of Harry Bosch and uses intuition and advanced questioning to untangle the ball of lies in each book.

The only downside of the series is that it has main antagonists who remain untouched over the series, like some kind of comic book supervillains.

I already finished the first 6 books of the series, having 2 left, and a few more with other protagonists. I gave 5*/5 to 5 of the 6 books and 4*/5 to one, which is pretty high for a series like that.