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A Hidden Fire

Book Review of Elizabeth Hunter’s A Hidden Fire (Elemental Mysteries #1)

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A Hidden FireI downloaded a copy of Elizabeth Hunter‘s A Hidden Fire from the Amazon KDP list. It’s still free BTW. 

Description from Goodreads:
“No secret stays hidden forever.”

A phone call from an old friend sets Dr. Giovanni Vecchio back on the path of a mystery he’d abandoned years before. He never expected a young librarian could hold the key to the search, nor could he have expected the danger she would attract. Now he and Beatrice De Novo will follow a twisted maze that leads from the archives of a university library, through the fires of Renaissance Florence, and toward a confrontation they never could have predicted.

A Hidden Fire is a paranormal mystery/romance for adult readers. It is the first book in the Elemental Mysteries Series.

Review:
For a free Amazon read, A Hidden Fire was surprisingly good. I can honestly say that the dialogue was some of the best I’ve read in a a while. B and Giovanni are quick witted and sarcastic. I really quite enjoyed their banter. I also really liked each of them as characters. Their molasses-slow romance, however, not so much. I got really, really tired of seeing them deny each other.

There were also times when the influence of other popular vampire books was a little too obvious. One particular scene really could have been cut and pasted from Twilight with little alteration beyond being in a library elevator instead of a forest. Nothing in this book is anywhere near as angsty as Twilight though. So big sigh of relief there.

I did think that it wrapped up far, far too easily. B’s computer wiz magic seemed just a little too convenient and I had a hard time accepting that she could pull it off so effortlessly and without any ill after effects. Kind of reminds the reader that main characters often have preternatural luck on top of everything else.

I’m happy to say that the book does conclude to a degree. (So many PNR these days don’t. They end on ridiculous cliffhangers that really just equate to incomplete stories.) A lot of threads are left open though. So anyone, like me, who prefers their stories in tight little packages instead of drug out across a whole series might be frustrated.

As an informative aside, the book is a really clean romance. There is no sex–a few kisses and quite a bit of longing, but no actual culmination. I felt a little cheated by this, but those who prefer to avoid the erotic should really enjoy this one.

Book Review of K.T. Swartz’s Juliet Harrison Novels

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I grabbed K.T. Swartz‘s first Juliet Harrison novel, These Chains That Bind, off of the KDP free list. (It’s still free, BTW.) I then bought the second two, Debtors Remorse and Carry Me Home.

These Chains That BindDescription from Goodreads:
Juliet Harrison can whip up one mean protection spell; Ezra Jacobs can snipe a man from a mile away. They might just be Columbus’ best detective duo… if only they’d stop arguing.

What do FBI agents, a bad-ass ex-marine, and a Mob Errand Boy have in common?

They’re all after one very annoyed Juliet Harrison.

Add to that a friend with an unrelenting ghost problem and a dangerous necromancer on the loose, and Juliet may not survive long enough to help the one person she can’t live without.

Review
I’m gonna start with a little OCD rant that I’ve made before. But it bothers me every single time, so I’m just gonna get it off of my chest. That cover is the wrong damned shape. There I said it. This is a book, not a CD. It needs a vertical rectangular cover so that it fits the standard and looks right when stacked with the rest of my digital books. Doesn’t it bother anyone else? It looks completely unprofessional to me, or at least very homemade (and not in a good way.) OK, moving on to the book.

I spent almost all of this book convinced that I wasn’t actually reading the first of the series. All my googling couldn’t come up with any prequel, so I suppose it must be number one. But there are a lot of rather important events referenced more than once that felt very much like the subject matter of a previous book. Carol’s death, for example, or whatever happened with Eli and his ex-wife, which is apparently how he and Juliet met.

These are not small matters. Carol was apparently Juliet’s long-term girlfriend, who was shot, possibly protecting Juliet. That’s a big deal. That’s important. That was still greatly affecting Juliet in this book, but never fully explored. Then Juliet spent roughly a third of this book helping Eli overcome the aftereffects of whatever transpired in the mysterious past event. That’s a lot of time to spend wondering what exactly it was that transpired.

I was really, really bothered by this. Either fully explore it or leave it out, but to just throw it out with no background and no follow-up is painful to read. Honestly, about 15% through the book, when I was so completely confused by these previous events and just realising they were never going to be explained, I almost gave up. I almost thought that if the author was such a poor storyteller that she didn’t recognise this as a GIANT plot hole, I shouldn’t hold out much hope for the book. I persevered, though, and I’m glad I did, because eventually the book moved away from its own history and developed a story of its own. It’s a darned good story too.

It’s the characters that make it I think. Juliet and Ezra have a wonderfully strained relationship. (Again, wish I knew the history of it. There is apparently 6 years worth.) He doesn’t speak much, but he’s a man of action. Juliet’s normal life would give most of us grey hair and it was a lot of fun to watch her navigate a world full of ghosts and poltergeists. I rather enjoyed the FBI agents as well. There was a lot of humour in Charlie and Juliet’s exchanges.

The plot itself seemed to be split into thirds: helping Ray and his friends, helping Eli, and trying to avoid GW. The whole Ray situation wraps up nicely. The Eli situation kind of wrapped up but really had no beginning, and I suspect it will crop up again in future books, and the GW situation had no end since it’s carrying over into book two. You can maybe see why I was never wholly convinced I really was reading book one.

On the whole, however, I found the writing quite refreshing, and there was a good amount of humour in it. I especially liked Juliet and Ezra’s constant jibes and insults. It was a bit of a running gag. I did notice a couple of repeat phrases, though. I think about a hundred people must have had the corner of their lip twitch, for example. I liked it enough to buy books two and three, so that should tell you something.
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Tallulah's got a shopping trolley

Book Review of C.L. McRitchie’s Tallulah’s Got A Shopping Trolley

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Tallulah's Got a Shopping TrolleyI grabbed my copy of Tallulah’s Got a Shopping Trolley, by C.L McRitchie from the Amazon KDP list.

Description from Goodreads:
I met Harvey on the car-park of Morrisons a few weeks ago. I’d forgotten to pick up a pack of pink and whites for Gran and had to do a late night dash.
Harvey was alive when I met him.
Not so alive when I left.
He’s now living in my flat and floats through walls.
Harvey is a ghost.
He blames me for killing him. I didn’t. It was an accident.
As punishment he floats into the bathroom when I’m showering and into the bedroom when I’m dressing.
He doesn’t look at me when he floats in – he doesn’t want to see me naked, he just does it to make me feel uncomfortable.
The truth is, I’m a bit put out that he doesn’t want to see me naked and that can’t healthy.
When he was alive Harvey was very attractive.
He still is.
He has sandy hair that occasionally flops into his eyes and he has developed a habit of giving me a sideways look whenever I say something stupid; So he does it a lot.
He has a calm confidence that I suspect belies an infrequent but fiery temper and he makes me feel safe – which is ridiculous given that he’s dead. His voice is like warm cinnamon and the twinkle in his eye gives me goosebumps.
When he was living he had a confident arrogance that made him successful – both in business and with women.
Harvey wouldn’t have looked twice at me when he was alive. He doesn’t now. And that irritates me and makes me want to re think my diet.
Sometimes I feel something electric pass between us, but that could be the poor wiring in the flat.
Nevertheless, Harvey is here and he is here until we find the elusive Tulip Martin, who vanished several years ago.
There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to find her, I suspect she’s dead and finding her means Harvey would be gone and I don’t want that.
Very soon I will learn that Harvey isn’t all he seems to be.
One day, Harvey will bring about my end.
But for the now he’s the sexy ghost living in my flat and I’m ok with that.

Review
Tallulah’s Got a Shopping Trolley needs three things badly–an editor,  a formatter and a new cover. There are a lot of editorial mistakes, especially in the beginning. It’s still perfectly readable, but it’s hard to miss them. I don’t think the word ‘brought’ had an r in it once in the whole darned book, for example.

The formatting is similarly hit and miss, both because there are a number of odd line breaks and such and because there are no paragraph indications. Neither indents nor hard returns are used at the beginning of a new paragraph, making it awkward to know where one ends and another begins. Seriously, if the book wasn’t double spaced, so that the lines are at least well spaced it would be all but unreadable. (What a shame that would be.)  

Lastly, IMO the cover is both unappealing (generic) and doesn’t accurately represent the subject matter of the story or portay the feel of the book, which despite being presented in a upbeat and light hearted narrative style,  is actually a little dark with a bitter sweet ending.

I imagine these three rather major issues put a lot of people off reading the book. Don’t let them. The book is a gem. It’s hilarious. It reminds me a lot of Leigh Parker’s 10 Ways series. A lot of the humour in both is based on the main protagonists frustration and the completely ridiculous circumstances she finds herself in by virtue of her own social ineptitude. Really funny.

There were a couple times in the course of reading this book where I had actual laughing fits. You know the type where you start laughing, eventually try to pull yourself together with a few deep breaths and stop, only to start up again–The unfortunate monkey incident. That disastrous first date. Hilarious.

About two thirds of the way in it veers off into the truly absurd and for a little while I was really disappointed, thinking the author had simply given up on writing a serious book. It’s all explained in the end, however, and despite the strong humorous vein running throughout the book I teared up at the end. 
I’ll also admit that the book has both a slow, confusing start and I was left with some unanswered questions. What exactly happened at the beach for example. The final result is pretty obvious, but not what the cause was.

This book lacks polish. Claiming anything else would be dishonest. But it’s good enough to be worth slogging through the mistakes and horrendous formatting. I would love to see the author have it professionally tended to and rereleased. The story deserves the attention.  (I downloaded it back in February, so it’s possible this has already been done and a new edition is available. I hope so, but have no way of knowing.)