Hanging by a Thread by Sophie Littlefield

Pub date: September 11, 2012.

Author website.

The quaint little beach town of Winston, California, may be full of wholesome townsfolk, picturesque beaches, and laid back charm, but Clare Knight is about to uncover something underneath its thriving demeanor. Someone is hiding something, and it's as gruesome as the townsfolk, and their stately homes, are stunning. Amanda Stavros, fellow classmate and resident of Winston, is gone and there's no sign of her ever coming back. Everyone says she was taken and murdered, but where's the evidence? Why isn't there a single ounce of proof? And why is everyone okay with this, except for Clare? 

Luckily—or as it's been turning out, unluckily—Clare possesses a gift, an ability to see visions from the clothes she works with. And since her clothes come solely from the townsfolk, Clare has become privy to some startling and disturbing memories of these townspeople. Will she uncover who killed Amanda Stavros? Or is she just moving herself up in line to be the next victim of Winston?  (netgalley.com)

Every once in a while I'll come across a book that'll drag me in not necessarily based on the blurb but the setting.  Winston, California reminded me a lot of Santa Cruz.  A bit more sedate, not as hippie-esque, but still a reminder.  Within the context of the story it lies south of Monterey and is three hours south of San Francisco, which makes it a little less than two hours away from Santa Cruz.  Sold.  I just love the area that much that a LOCATION will pull me into a book.  Premise need not apply.

Lucky for me HANGING BY A THREAD was actually a really good book and a welcome addition to a sorely underrepresented thriller market in YA.  Yes, it has slightly supernatural elements: Clare sees people's histories when she touches clothes, something her mother has brow-beaten into her as being bad while her grandmother (also a gift-holder) doesn't feel the same way, leaving a lovely rift in the family.

So while Clare's mom did her best to eliminate this "gift" from her daughter, it's left Clare a bit conflicted.  She's started seeing things in some random clothes she picked up.  And they're horrible things.  And she just doesn't know what to do about it.  The town has a murder mystery that's going to end up destroying it and Clare just might have it in her to solve it.  Except for the fact that she wants nothing more than to fit in in a new, and small, town.  What would her new friends think if they knew about what she could do?  Call her a freak?  Probably.  So not only is she torn about how to use her gift at home, she doesn't even know if she should be herself socially, if people will accept her for it.

I loved Clare.  I loved that she was so passionate about design, that she was so goal-oriented about making her passion work for her and how, at sixteen-years-old, she already as a small "business" selling her wares in her new home.  Her new friends love her style and all she wants to do is make the history of her family (and the supposed haunted house she lives in) go away and she does a pretty good job of it.  It also helps that most of the people she comes in contact with don't put as much emphasis on her family's past as she does.  Really she's just such a wonderful character that it was impossible for me to not immediately get on her side about everything.  And then the crap really started hitting the fan and she didn't have all the answers and actually had to do work herself (loved that! kind of rare in YA, unfortunately) I could actually feel her being torn about things, I could feel her desire to help but at the same time warring with herself about just what she could do.

Her love interest, Jake, I was less than impressed with.  He's set up to have a bad reputation from the beginning which, I think, is a fairly obvious red herring to some extent but he really didn't do much to put the kibosh on any of it.  He was temperamental, snapped at Clare a lot, gave her the cold shoulder after little more than a comment he wasn't thrilled with.  I did like the fact that Clare argued with herself over liking him, about how she shouldn't because there was something off about him.  At least she realized it but ultimately it didn't stop her which kind of irked me.  He did turn out to be a good guy but if it were me just the things he said and how he acted in the beginning would have been a total turn-off and not something I would have pursued.

HANGING BY A THREAD offers its own unique blend of supernatural and thriller to deliver a story that'll keep you sucked in from the beginning.  Balanced out by Clare's will to just have a normal life, it gives the story just enough grounding to keep it something believable as opposed to launching it into outer space.  It won't take very long before you start trying to put the pieces together and try and solve the mystery right along with Clare.  Even if you're not big into supernatural elements, Clare's ability isn't an overwhelming force in the story.  It serves it's purpose and it could have gotten out of control but Littlefield did an excellent job of reigning it in and keeping it relevant to the plot and making sure Clare didn't lose focus of it.  Of course the story wouldn't be what it is without Clare's gift but it moves things along without leading them along.

Just like YA needs more horror, it needs more thriller as well.  A story that focuses on THE STORY, where the main motivation, the main theme, is the thriller aspect.  Not romance, not angst, thriller.  HANGING BY A THREAD delivers not only all of this but blissfully leaves behind the love triangle for something, you know, more interesting.

Ban Factor: Medium - Banners would actually need to read the book to find anything objectionable, like teen murder and pre-marital kissing.  So this could rightly fly under the radar.

Samantha Moon by JR Rain

Pub date: June 5, 2012.

Author website.

Mother, wife, private investigator ... and vampire. Six years ago, federal agent Samantha Moon was the perfect wife and soccer mom with the minivan and suburban home. Then the unthinkable happened, an attack that changed her life forever. And forever is a very long time for a vampire.


Samantha's adventures as a night-roaming vampire and private investigator in Samantha Moon include ...


Vampire for Hire #1) Moon Dance: Samantha is hired by Kingsley Fulcrum to investigate the attempt on his life, a horrific scene watched on TV around the country. But Kingsley isn't exactly what he appears to be; after all, there is a reason why he survived five shots to the head.


Vampire for Hire #2) Vampire Moon: Samantha Moon hunts down a powerful crime lord and protects an innocent woman from her ruthless ex-husband-all while two very different men vie for her heart. As the stakes grow higher and her cases turn personal, Samantha Moon will do whatever it takes to protect the innocent and bring two cold-blooded killers to justice-her own brand of justice.


Vampire for Hire #3) American Vampire: Samantha receives a heartbreaking call from a very unlikely source: a five-year-old girl who's been missing for three months. Using her considerable resources-including her growing supernatural abilities-to locate the missing girl before it's too late, Samantha also receives devastating news on the home front, forcing her to make the ultimate choice of life and death.


Vampire for Hire #4) Moon Child: Samantha Moon is faced with an impossible decision that will change her life and those of the ones she loves forever-a decision that no mother should ever have to make. And through it all, Samantha finds herself in a lethal game of vampire versus vampire as a powerful and desperate enemy will stop at nothing to claim what he most desires.


Christmas Moon: With Christmas just around the corner, Samantha takes on a very strange case: A priceless family treasure has been stolen, something passed down through the generations and buried in secrets. And Samantha gets half of whatever it is ... if she can find it first.


... and an all-new Samantha Moon short story by J.R. Rain.  (netgalley.com)

I was SUPER excited to get to reading this omnibus.  Mainly because I'm a little desperate for something different.  As if vampires are something different, right?  But this just sounded so neat.  A vampire PI?  Hell yeah I'll try that out.

Eleven pages into book one and I wanted to light it on fire.  I mean we're talking so bad I actually stopped reading.  I know I've had a small string of DNFs lately but you all know me; I usually give them far more of a chance than a mere eleven pages.  Hell, HALO got more than that from me.  I just couldn't do it with SAMANTHA MOON.  It was too terrible.

First the writing, much like WILDE'S FIRE, was too unpolished.  The sentences were just strung along together, getting me from point A to point B with no flourish and would alternate between zipping through seemingly more important moments, like backstory, and hanging out at mundane crap I didn't care about, like picking up her kids from school.  I don't care.  It was an underdeveloped work.

Next the MC wanted to hump every male leg that she crossed paths with.  I'm okay with vamporn of the pornpire.  Not a problem with it.  But I HATE it when every male that crossed the MC's path is described by their varying levels of fuckability.  Especially when the MC is already married.  Yeah, no.    Bitch, you're a trashhole.  The opening scene was Samantha getting a delivery from a UPS guy and I honest to god thought it was either a porn dream or I was reading erotica with the way the dude was described.  And of course he was some super awesome, super sexy guy that the MC just wanted to bang right against the door jamb.  Yeah, because all of my delivery men look like that.  And she constantly had to throw mental ice water on herself.  I was just not cool with it.  Especially since she was already married.  It's okay to look but this woman might as well have just ingested a keg of Spanish Fly.  Gross.

And then there was the name-dropping.  Burger King, Coppertone and a few others.  In eleven pages there were five that I counted, four of those within three consecutive paragraphs.  Annoying.  Why can't you just say you stopped for burgers?  Why can't you just say you slathered on sunscreen?  Do you get paid for every name you drop?  Blech.

But the kicker?  Samantha was viewing video footage of some dude getting gunned down.  And the assassin was using a .22.  NOT A CHANCE IN HELL.  Did the guy sit down to pee too?  But I kept reading.  And then that same gun totally shredded a tree big enough to hide a guy the size of a Coke machine.  And we're done.  Fucking seriously?  Dear authors: if you're going to write about guns, DO YOUR GODDAMN RESEARCH.  I hate it when authors want to use guns but instead of actually looking into them they just watch some movies with guns in them.  I'm sure this author would have people flying back after getting hit with a .22 too.  Boo.  Sorry, author.  You've totally blown my trust.  We can't be friends.

So yeah.  Eleven pages into book one and done.  Could I recommend this to someone?  If you like mediocre writing, name-dropping and know nothing about guns and can thus swallow such fallacies, by all means take a stab at it.  I won't be making it.

Ban Factor: High - Vampires, assassins and a way-too-horny married woman.  Yeah, cooked.

YAckers Review: I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga

Published April 3, 2012.

Author website.

Jasper (Jazz) Dent is a likable teenager. A charmer, one might say.


But he's also the son of the world's most infamous serial killer, and for Dear Old Dad, Take Your Son to Work Day was year-round. Jazz has witnessed crime scenes the way cops wish they could--from the criminal's point of view.


And now bodies are piling up in Lobo's Nod.


In an effort to clear his name, Jazz joins the police in a hunt for a new serial killer. But Jazz has a secret--could he be more like his father than anyone knows?  (goodreads.com)

Lyga is demented.  And I love him so hard for it.  I HUNT KILLERS is unique and thoroughly disturbing and though all of us who read it, at times, questioned just where Lyga was when he wrote this, we had a lot of good to say about it.  So incredibly well-written, if you don't feel just a little repulsed as what's going on in these pages then something must be wrong with you.  Seriously.  I mean I wasn't as affected as some of my fellow YAckers were but there were moments where I pulled back a little.  I'm only human.  Mostly.

The Keeper of the Book this month was Holly so why don't you come stop by her site, Book Harbinger, and see what we had to say about I HUNT KILLERS.  CORNNUTS!

Ban Factor: High - OMG, are you kidding me?  The banners would burn this one alive.

The Paradise Prophecy by Robert Browne

Published July 21, 2011.

THE MYTH:

When God cast the archangel Satan into Hell, ending the War in Heaven, peace prevailed on Earth. Until the fallen angels took revenge in the Garden of Eden. Ever since, mankind has been in a struggle between good and evil, paradise and apocalypse: the fall of Rome, the Crusades, world wars, nuclear proliferation, the Middle East crisis. The War in Heaven never really ended-it just changed venues. For millennia, God's angels have been fighting Satan's demons on Earth to try to prevent Satan's greatest ambition-the apocalypse.

THE REALITY:

Satan has never been closer to his goal than right now.

Agent Bernadette Callahan is a talented investigator at a shadowy government organization known only as Section, on the trail of a serial killer with nearly supernatural abilities. Sebastian "Batty" LaLaurie is a religious historian who knows far too much about the other side-and that hard-earned knowledge is exactly what Callahan needs. This unlikely duo pairs up for a race across the globe, decoding clues left in ancient texts from the Bible to Paradise Lost and beyond. In the process they stumble upon a vast conspiracy-one beyond the scope of mankind's darkest imagination. (netgalley.com)

I'm gonna be honest. I probably wouldn't be as interested in a title like this if it weren't for Supernatural. Do you blame me? C'mon . . . have you SEEN Castiel? And maybe a little bite of Crowley, if for nothing more than his snarkitude?

But I liked what this book was promising. It's got religion without too much Jesus going on (actually there was hardly any at all); there isn't much god about it either, believe it or not. The focus is really on the angels, and the demon angels (in this world there aren't any demons a la Supernatural, the "demons" are fallen angels on Lucifer's side), and the fight to open up Hell's door and release Lucy from his cage. I liked that. There was a heavy theological element without it being preachy or, in Callahan's words, all woo-woo with the divine. It had a purpose and it stuck to it.

I liked this book to the point that I want to go out and read more of Browne's works. This guy writes up my alley, and not all of his stuff is like THE PARADISE PROPHECY either. But he does write thrillers and, judging just by this book, he writes them well.

It's been a long time since I've read a non-YA book that had me rocketing through it and Browne's PARADISE did just that. He writes in such a way that even when there isn't any action going on in the chapter, it feels like it. There's always some kind of threat lingering, even if it's off the page, and he makes sure that his characters feel it.

And his characters! They are haunted, damaged beings and he torments them with it. And I love it, the sadist that I am. Both Callahan and LaLaurie have some very large chips that they have to carry around on their shoulders but it doesn't sour them as characters. They don't sit around and pity themselves. They're not a drain on the plot. They have their issues but they turn them around into strengths. Even the most gruesome of pasts turns out to be helpful to the overall cause.

The only part that I was less than thrilled with was the ending. I felt it was a bit anticlimactic and ended a bit too abruptly for my liking. Like a button was pushed and poof! Over! It could have been set up for a sequel but I'm not sure if PARADISE is anything more than a stand alone. Other than that, even the fallen angels he uses are multidimensional. They, too, have weaknesses. Even angels aren't perfect and I like that.

Everything I was reading just felt so real. It felt like Browne had a firm grasp on the Christian mythos and what he created eased seamlessly into it, making it read as if it were something that really did/could happen. PARADISE never felt kitchy or over the top. I never felt like it was reaching for something that wasn't there. It was a level-headed, action-packed jet through the apocalypse. I'm willing to take another ride.

I think THE PARADISE PROPHECY would appeal even to readers of YA that have a thing for the angels and demons mythos. Even thought the characters aren't young, their ages aren't factors in the story so while reading it, they could have been much younger (although with Callahan's experience, that would have made the story reaching). But it's not about the age. The story is just great. If you're looking for an angels and demons story that DOESN'T revolves around some thinly-veiled abusive relationship between angels and humans, you'll find it with PARADISE. In fact, there really isn't much love interest at all in this. It keeps to the point and it's a point you'll want to ride all the way to the end. And then it'll leave you craving for more.

Ban Factor: High - Really? With how this book bastardizes Christianity? The banners would want to light it on fire. Irrespective of the sexy times.

Num8ers by Rachel Ward

Published February 1, 2010.

Since the day her mother died, Jem has known about the numbers.

Numbers that pop into her head when she looks into someone's eyes. They're dates, the numbers. Dates predicting with brute accuracy each person's death.

Burdened by such grim knowledge, Jem avoids relationships. Until she meets Spider, another outsider, and takes a chance. Maybe they can find happiness together, if only in the brief time that remains before his expiration date.

But on a trip to London, Jem foresees a chilling chain of events:

The city's a target.

The clock's running out.

The countdown is on to a blowup! (book flap blurb)

DNF. I just couldn't get through it. The main reason was I was just so disgusted with Spider's lack of personal hygiene. It's not that he doesn't have the ability to shower; he just doesn't. So every time Jem mentioned his stank, I gagged a little. Great character but I couldn't get past that. How could you not smell your own muck? How can you be content to just wallow in your own filth? I didn't get it and after a while I didn't want to. It was made such a prominent point in the story that it seemed that that's what Spider was: dirty, more than anything else. It was mentioned more than anything else. Blech. Pass.

The other thing that made me put the book down was the numbers thing itself. Jem sees numbers in people's eyes. They're the days that they're all going to die. But . . . what? That numbers thing didn't seem to have a greater purpose. It just seemed like something to make the plot go forward. I felt you could have switched it out with something else entirely, or just plain bad timing, and it wouldn't have made a difference. There is an inkling of something with Spider's grandmother but she gets left behind, literally, so it continues to seem aimless.

That's pretty much it. Spider's need to shower and the seeming irrelevance of the numbers themselves made me stop. The writing was good. I mean, look at how it made me feel. But I didn't see the point to the numbers, which were the motivating factors of the story itself. I'm sure it goes somewhere but I'm just not patient enough to finish taking the trip.

I do think the writing is really strong and I definitely felt everything I read. I wouldn't pass this one up entirely. It just wasn't for me. I thought it was going to be more involved than what it was. Maybe I'm missing something at the end but I won't lose sleep over it.

Red to Black by Alex Dryden + Contest!

Pub date: September, 2009

Finn is a veteran operative for MI6, stationed in Moscow. In the guise of an amiable trade secretary, he has penetrated deep into the dangerous labyrinth that is Russia under Vladimir Putin to discover some of its darkest secrets, thanks to a high-level source deep within the Kremlin.

The youngest female colonel in the KGB, Anna is the ambitious daughter of one of the former Soviet Union's elite espionage families. Charged with helping to make Russia strong again under Putin, she is ordered to spy on Finn and discover the identity of his mole.

At the dawn of the new millennium, these adversaries find themselves brought together by an unexpected love that becomes the only truth they can trust. When Finn uncovers a shocking and ingenious plan - hatched in the depths of the Cold War - to control the European continent and shift the balance of world power, he and Anna are thrust into a deadly plot in which friend and foe wear the same face. With time running out, they will race across Europe and risk everything - career, reputation, and even their own lives - to expose the terrifying truth. (book back blurb)

After The Sentinels, I just didn't have the patience to actually get through this one. I didn't even get 100 pages in before I gave up on it. Despite the larger font and even larger margins, it was like sludging through molasses and when you get to a point where you're dreading to pick up and read anymore of a book, it's time to stop reading it.

It was nearly pure exposition up until my stopping point, and nonlinear at that. The stories the MC kept telling were jumping all over the time line and I found myself having a hard time keeping track of what happened when and where. If you're a Russian history buff, I'm sure it wouldn't have been a problem. Seeing as I'm not, the facts of the story kept getting lost on me because I couldn't remember them.

I wish the MC had a little more emotion. Maybe she does and it doesn't appear until later in the book, because that this point, not all that much has happened so there isn't much to get worked up over. But right now, she's kind of blah and doesn't react much one way or another to what she does see and/or do. But I won't know because I just can't bring myself to keep reading. I don't have the patience and I have better books to read in my TBR pile.

I'm not going to rate this one because it's not fair to. It could rightly get amazing after all the exposition's out. I just don't have the patience to wait that long.

CONTEST TIME!!!

You want to give it a whirl? All yours. Just leave a comment with your email. I hope it works out better for you! Contest will end August 16th.