Posts Categorized: eARC

Review by Travis Starnes The Survivors Club is a fairly classic detective story set in Arizona near the border between the US and Mexico.  While investigating an apparent drug cartel murder detective Tess McCrae begins to see a disturbing pattern. As mysteries go this one is solid.  It has pretty much everything you could ask for from a “who done it” and avoids a lot of the pit falls I have seen in other mysteries lately.  The mystery itself is very well conceived.  There is just enough information to keep you guessing but a tough enough puzzle that you don’t figure it out till the very end.  I particularly liked how the various murders were all connected together and I doubled back on my guess several times as parts of the story were revealed. J. Carsen Black is not an author I was familiar with prior to reading this book,… Read more »

Review by Travis Starnes Orbital Decay is a mixture of classic science fiction and cold war era fiction.  Construction workers on a space instillation learn that the bases real purpose is to spy on Americans and they decide to take matters into their own hands. Overall this isn’t a bad story and reading it as someone living 20+ years after it was written it is easy to see parts of the book that are almost prescient.   It shows how the public consciousness concerned about government surveillance is not limited to recent events and has been a concern for a very long time. While the moral of the story does hold up the rest of the book feels highly dated.  This is definitely a work from a Cold War mindset and you can feel that throughout the story.  There are also many references that were topical at the time but no… Read more »

Review by Travis Starnes The Back Road is a thriller about the secrets that surround Ellie Saunders, her family and her friends.  The tale is punctuated with murder, stalking and a whole lot of lying.  I will start by saying that I did not love this book.  It wasn’t terrible but I found some the book off-putting. Generally the book is well written.  Rachel Abbott is clearly a talented writer and the story does have a decent flow to it.  It should be noted that this is the slow psychological style of thriller and not the heart racing, fast moving story that many thrillers have become.  Abbott is focused on weaving a complex story and trying to keep the reader on edge, and for the most part she is successful. I found the dialog particularly well written.  In so many thrillers the conversations are either weird expositions that sound strangely… Read more »

Review by Travis Starnes A dark and disturbing thriller about a family, life, and loss, Harrowgate  is a suspenseful mystery about a man who finds his new baby and wife slightly different every time he comes back home.  He must fight to keep his family together in the face of a malevolent force. Although this book does dark and disturbing very well I really did not enjoy reading it.  On the positive side Maruyama has a good handle on writing suspense and mystery.  The plot and its various twists definitely have the potential for keeping the reader on the edge of their seats.  If this plot was in the hands of another writer it could possibly be an amazing tale. The big issue however was that it was not written by someone else.  I found the writing to be extremely clunky and heavy handed.  Sentences have a very strange structure… Read more »

Review by Travis Starnes Practice to deceive follows a murder investigation on a small island in the Puget Sound.  A lot of unusually suspicious parties surround the Christmas day murder of Russell Douglass, unfortunately evidence is a lot more sparse. The detectives spend eight years talking to anyone connected to the man and his murder in an effort to solve one of the toughest mysteries they will come across. Ann Rule has been doing true crime for more than 30 years and she is a real master at her craft.  While this book is far from perfect it hits all the notes you would want in a true crime novel and is pretty solid read. This book has everything going for it; greed, sex and scandal. The one big thing that stands out for me in this book is the narrative voice Mrs. Rule uses.  Unlike many of the true… Read more »

Review by Travis Starnes I enjoy a good thriller and a good mystery and this book mixes the two genres up fairly well.  The story follows Mark Kidder and the Alpha Team of “The Dept” as they track down a suspected terrorist and killer, and flashes back to related events set during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. There are some really good things going for this book.  The plot overall is well detailed and complex which works for this type of story.  With multiple factions to follow including the Dept, the schemers in MI5, a serial killing terrorist, and a Bosnian Colonel out for blood there are a lot of threads to keep up with.  For such a spread out plot and so many parties Smith does a good job of pulling all the pieces together at the end, not always a sure thing when the story gets this… Read more »

Review by Travis Starnes While I have read a lot of historical fiction set during World War II this one takes an interesting perspective on the genre by having the entire point of view take place from the German side.  The story focuses on a group of plotters within the Nazi military and government and their often competing schemes to steal a shipment of gold and escape Germany just ahead of the invading allied armies. Colin Fulton definitely knows his history and it is clear he has done a good amount of research for this book.  He takes a series of real events, all of which he lays out in an appendix at the end of the book, and places his story around the edges of history that remain a mystery in real life.  He takes this one step further by not only using well-known figures from history as a… Read more »

Review by Travis Starnes I recently got a hold of a copy of Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form and was genuinely excited to read it.  I do a lot of study on the medium thanks to a project I have been working on for several years and consider myself well versed on the subject and am always looking for new ways to examine the art form. Although not a long time comic person as it has only been the last few years that I revisited comics since I was a child.  This book was marked that it would “appeal to the general comics reader” and seemed like a great way to start a new direction in conversations on comics. Unfortunately neither the marketing nor the book lived up to even my least expectation.  This book reads like someone published their English doctoral thesis, in fact I… Read more »