August 17, 2009

In the Garden trilogy by Nora Roberts (Blue Dahlia, Black Rose, Red Lily)

Filed under: Detective Novel, Light Reading, Romance, Thriller — Tags: , , , , , , — susan @ 11:17 pm

For some good suspense romance, check out these three books; Blue Dahlia, Black Rose and Red Lily, which together form the “In the Garden” trilogy by Nora Roberts. This is a great easy-to-read story that I found captivating on many levels. First, the romance is divine especially with such strong female leads. Second, you have to love a mystery as entrenched and spooky as a hundred-year-old poltergeist. Third, the interesting development of the characters as they meet, become friends, and then grow to be a family.

Each of the three books covers one of the three different women, all from different stages in their lives. In the Garden is a nursery where all three women work. The three of them become roommates and close friends. In the midst of some major plant analogies and academic gardening technique, you come to understand these womens’ lives, their struggles and their victories. As they help one another, each grows and learns in life and love. Family is a major theme.

I always love it when a good light romance is spiced up with a some excitement, and what better than a ghost running mad around the house? The Harper Bride ghost starts out singing nice sweet lullabies and ends up causing trouble. The ladies must find the answer to this mystery and help out the ghost before it goes postal and brings down the household. The three books are sequential, you must read them in order for the mystery of the ghost to unfold.

The romances are good, all different and interesting, and not cliche. As the lives of the characters intersect with each other the story that unfolds seems very real to me. The different relationships and people’s actions and dialog are authentic. Classic Nora Roberts with her great plots, believable characters, and talented writing skills.

In Blue Dahlia, there is a middle-aged mom who is a widow looking for a new start. She meets a rugged landscaper who drives her crazy. In Black Rose, the lead is the nursery business owner, an established, wealthy, mature woman with three adult children and two previous marraiges. She starts playing detective with an ‘absent-minded professor’ delving into her family heritage to figure out more about the ghost. In Red Lily, there is young new mom just starting out. She has the hots for the boss’s son, and she’s trying to keep her hands off!

All three stories are fun and kept me burning the midnight oil reading to find out what happens next! As someone who does NOT read horror books, The Harper Bride ghost was not scary enough for me to be turned off or frightened. Just enough to keep things interesting. I hope you find this triology as entertaining as I did! Happy reading!

August 1, 2009

Phatoms, by Dean Koonz

Filed under: Horror, Light Reading, Thriller — Tags: — david @ 2:13 pm

This is an old book, first published in 1983. Nevertheless, it maintains a lot of the characteristics I enjoy about Koontz’s most recent books. It’s amazing to me that he’s been at it for more than 25 years and that his first books already had those characteristics I like. Maybe you think this is a bad thing rather than good; maybe it shows a lack of authoristic development that his newest books don’t show radical improvements over his initial ones. I don’t think so.

First, I think the books have improved. While the characters in Phatoms seemed quite accessible to me and I feel like I got to know them, I certainly didn’t develop as strong a connection as I have to more recent characters like Odd Thomas and those in Life Expectancy. It’s also hard to explain, but I think the prose is tighter and more accessible to the general populous. This is a good thing because Koontz writes popular fiction. He doesn’t try to write The Great American Novel (TGAN) with each of his books; it seems that he’s more interested in writing books that people actually enjoy reading. Those that provide a temporary escape from the stresses of daily life. This is important because it’s taken me the better part of 20 years to realize that I don’t need to write TGAN and I would be comfortable writing popular fiction.

On to the actual story…this is more of a straight horror novel than his other books. In fact, in the afterword, Koontz regrets writing this book inasmuch as it got him labelled as a horror writer. That being said, I consider it a thriller more than a straight horror novel. While the basic premise of the story is basic “these people are trapped and the unnatural killer feeds on them and you know that more people are going to die every 30 pages or so,” I was quite pleased with the additional scientific explanations that most horror novels leave out. While the scientific explanations did push the bounds of credulity, I was able to accept them as a bonus to an otherwise fairly standard horror novel.

There were a couple of down points to the book, though. First, there were too many central characters for me to keep track of. While Koontz does put in the reminders you need to remember the characters (e.g. the deputy sheriff said, she shook her long brown hair), I still couldn’t track all of them. The two main characters are a woman and her younger sister. These were easy for me to track and I enjoyed getting to know them. The problem came in with all of the police officers. Most of the rest of the cast are sheriffs, deputies, etc. and were too similar for me to follow. This is one of those things that I haven’t noticed in his more recent books.

*MINOR SPOILERS*

There were also a couple of plot points that I just didn’t understand. There is the whole side story of the biker gang and the wife/child killer. I waited and waited for these stories to come into the main trunk of the story and claim some importance, but they never did. Or, at least, I don’t feel that they did. Both the killer and the leader of the gang do end up talking to the “Ancient Enemy” and promise to carry on his work…but otherwise they seem completely tangential and I would have liked the book better without them.

Overall, this was a reasonably good book and I did enjoy reading it. Nevertheless, I would recommend most any of Koontz’s more recent dozen books over this one. So if you’ve already read most of his recent books (like I have), and you can pick up a copy of this book cheap, do so and marvel at the writing machine that is Dean Koontz.