Tag Archives: audiobook

Review of Cold Shadows (Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper #2), by J.L. Bryan

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I borrowed an audio copy of J.L Bryan‘s Cold Shadows through Hoopla and my local library.

Description from Goodreads:

Paranormal investigator Ellie Jordan faces a difficult new case. Her new clients are a family haunted by multiple ghosts and a poltergeist that wrecks their home at night. Their seven-year-old son’s invisible friends may not be imaginary at all but the restless spirits of dead children. To clear her clients’ house of the dangerous entities, Ellie must unravel the mysterious deaths of another family who lived in the old mansion more than a hundred and sixty years ago, and she must do it before the ghosts can carry out their malevolent designs on her clients and their children.

Review:

Enjoyable enough. It’d been quite a long time since I read book one in this series. I honestly didn’t remember much beyond the bare bones. But I was able to pick this one up without trouble. It suffers from a bit of the “we did this” and then “we did this” writing, Ellie seems to take beating after beating without effect, and honestly I couldn’t figure out how the homeowner kept sleeping through all the racket she and the ghosts must have been making. But it was a fun little ghost mystery. 

I 100% approve of seeing a paraplegic, wheelchair using business owner. He may not play a big part in the book, page-wise, but he is an important character. (I’m sure he was in book one too, but as I’d forgotten, it got to be a new surprise again.) Similarly, there are characters who are “plump,” but no issue is made of it. 

All in all, Ellie Jordon is just as advertised, a ghost-hunter. And the book is thus exactly as you would expect, a story of hunting ghosts. There isn’t yet a lot more depth to the plotting (though there seem to be some hints of a deeper mystery in the future). I’d be willing to read it…or listen. Carla Mercer-Meyer did a fine job with the narration of this one.

Book Review of Blood Oath (Nathaniel Cade #1), by Christopher Farnsworth

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I borrowed an audio copy of Christopher Farnsworth‘s Blood Oath from my local library.

Description from Goodreads:

Zach Barrows is an ambitious young White House staffer whose career takes an unexpected turn when he’s partnered with Nathaniel Cade, a secret agent sworn to protect the President. But Cade is no ordinary civil servant. Bound 140 years ago by a special blood oath, Nathaniel Cade is a vampire. He battles nightmares before they can break into the daylight world of the American dream, enemies far stranger – and far more dangeorus – than civilians have ever imagined.

Review:

This wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t anything new and inspiring either. I liked that Cade is so demonstrably inhuman. I thought Zach was funny. I liked the idea of the secret, crime-fighting vampire. All in all I enjoyed the book. 

My only real complaint, beyond there being nothing particularly new here, is that (as is SO OFTEN the case, especially with male authors) there are exactly 3 women in the book. They all play minor roles. Two are the lovers of more important male characters and one uses sex as a weapon and currency to get what she wants. 

Is it truly not possible to have a female character who isn’t characterized by who she has sex with or why? This book wasn’t really any worse than other books in the regard, but as always, it’s an irritant that you can’t unnoticed once you do. And once you start noticing, you realize how painfully frequent it is.

Bronson Pinchot did all right with the narration. I thought he played Cade too dryly. He sounded board for most of the book, instead of intense. But it wasn’t unpleasant to listen to, on the whole.

Book Review of The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings #2), by Mackenzi Lee

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I borrowed an audio copy of Mackenzi Lee’s The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy from my local library. I reviewed the first book in the series, The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, last year.

Description from Goodreads:

A year after an accidentally whirlwind grand tour with her brother Monty, Felicity Montague has returned to England with two goals in mind—avoid the marriage proposal of a lovestruck suitor from Edinburgh and enroll in medical school. However, her intellect and passion will never be enough in the eyes of the administrators, who see men as the sole guardians of science.

But then a window of opportunity opens—a doctor she idolizes is marrying an old friend of hers in Germany. Felicity believes if she could meet this man he could change her future, but she has no money of her own to make the trip. Luckily, a mysterious young woman is willing to pay Felicity’s way, so long as she’s allowed to travel with Felicity disguised as her maid.

In spite of her suspicions, Felicity agrees, but once the girl’s true motives are revealed, Felicity becomes part of a perilous quest that leads them from the German countryside to the promenades of Zurich to secrets lurking beneath the Atlantic.

Review:

I really wanted to like this a lot more than I did. Hmmm, that’s not quite right. I actually did really quite like it. I liked the representation and diversity of the book. I liked the wit and writing in the book. I liked Moira Quirk’s narration. I liked Felicity. I liked what she wanted and demanded in life. I liked that she was smart and determined and uncompromising.

I liked her feminism! But even as a staunch feminist myself, this same feminism was my biggest problem with the book and kept me from truly loving it. I’m not sure exactly how to explain this. Because I agree with Felicity 100% that she deserved to be allowed to study. That women deserved not to be stifled and protected from their own ambitions. But this is just such a modern ideal. It’s not that there weren’t women who strived to be more than mothers and wives, but Felicity kept acting as if she could reasonably expect different reactions from the men of society. That they, not her were the abnormal ones. The same society she had been raised in, with the same underlying mores. Most of her internal musings sounded horridly anachronistic to the time period the book is set in. It clashed jarringly. Eventually it started to feel like didactic lecture on what should be, instead of an engagement of what was (and to an extent still is). And in the end, undermined my ability to suspend my disbelief enough to truly immerse myself in the story.