Sweet Fall by QK Petty

Description from Goodreads:

Every storm leaves scars. Some never heal.

The House of David has fallen—fractured, betrayed, and cast into the shadows of a world teetering on the brink of ruin. But amid the wreckage, Tennin Aiden Yeager stands with the last of his allies, determined to stop Seditio from finishing what they started.

As a new threat emerges in the form of Mary Denau, a chaos-seeker with a dark obsession, old enemies and unlikely allies collide in a final confrontation that will decide the fate of both the living and the damned. And when a mysterious child with blood tied to the relics enters the fray, every choice becomes a gamble between redemption and destruction.

Sweet Fall, the breathtaking finale of A Series of Four Seasons, delivers a raw, emotional climax where healing hurts, redemption cuts, and survival comes at a cost.

The seasons are ending. Only the strongest will see the dawn.

The House of David versus Seditio. But each side has suffered its share of losses and wants the fight over. So when a child with a special blood ability comes along, it’s going to be a fight to the death – but whose death…

This is the fourth book in the series, so it was initially a little difficult to understand the roles of the characters within the story and to each other, but the main theme that stuck out to me was redemption. While certain things became clearer later, some of the weapons and their abilities never came through. I found the idea behind the relics and the bacteria in Alexander the Great’s body that allowed for regeneration intriguing. Then added to the mix were those whose blood had special abilities.

You have Aiden on one side, who is conflicted about being able to lead yet still show compassion. And you have Mary on the other, who is hellbent on destruction and whatever chaos and physical destruction she can cause. But she is conflicted too, and is starting to make decisions very contrary to her evil nature. And in the middle is Dallis, a young girl with blood that has regenerative properties. There are quite a few characters in the story, but the author has been able to convey each unique identity well, and you become invested in each one.

The writing style seemed to change right after the beginning of the book. It was very (almost too much) descriptive and airy in a way, and then as soon as it changed to the present, the writing became a lot more to the point. The action sequences were well detailed, and the quieter moments held gravity.

What a pity this story had so many proofing errors, though. They ranged from things like missing or doubled-up quotation marks, to commas missing before direct address, to missing words in sentences or sentences being repeated right after each other. A character’s name changed spelling throughout, and at one stage, a character had a dress on that suddenly changed into pants.

This will appeal to fans of clever fantasy stories that don’t hold back on the action. There is a trigger warning for this as there is physical torture, and some of it happens to children, so take that into account. But overall, a great read…

The line between good and evil can be blurred… sometimes…

Thanks to Reedsy Discovery and the author for the opportunity to review the book:
https://reedsy.com/discovery/book/swe...

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Description from Goodreads as Amazon’s description only had half of it!

On a stifling summer's day, eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters sit in their broken-down car, waiting for their mother to come back and rescue them. Jack's in charge, she said. I won't be long.

But she doesn't come back. She never comes back. And life as the children know it is changed for ever.

Three years later, mum-to-be Catherine wakes to find a knife beside her bed, and a note that says: I could have killed you.

Meanwhile Jack is still in charge - of his sisters, of supporting them all, of making sure nobody knows they're alone in the house, and - quite suddenly - of finding out the truth about what happened to his mother.

But the truth can be a dangerous thing ...

So with a description like that, you’ve just got to get excited about what will happen, right?

Oh boy. This descended into a comedy at times and was definitely not an on-the-edge-of-your-seat thriller.

We start off with the three kids being left in the car while their mom goes to call for help from an emergency phone on the side of the road. But the mom does not come back. So off they go to try to find her but no luck. Fast forward and they get picked up and taken home, their mom’s murdered body gets found, and their dad loses it and goes out to get milk one day and never returns. Jack is now in charge and does whatever he can to get food and money for them.

On the other side of the coin is a pregnant Catherine who wakes up with the note next to her and freaks out but doesn’t tell her husband about it. Cue the confusion about pregnancy brain and not being able to take care of herself.

In the town (which is boring and where murders don’t happen enough according to the new police arrival Detective Marvel) the hunt is on for the Goldilocks vandal – someone who breaks in to empty houses and steals things and sleeps in a bed for a night. And obviously these two plots are going to intersect.

The plot at this point is still somewhat going in the right direction. BUT… the execution. You have another cop (Reynolds) working with the team who is an absolute stickler for rules and will not deviate from the straight and narrow. Until he makes an error or two that derail things and then all of a sudden there can be grey areas. You have Marvel who tries to set up a capture house for Goldilocks by “remembering” that if you put bait in the right place it can capture the thing you want. What???

So Goldilocks has found the knife linked to the murder and is trying to get someone to get the cops to see it. The knife is an extremely expensive one-of-a-kind item that apparently the original cops on the case didn’t follow up on. Weird. And now it’s just the path to proving who did it.

You have coincidence after coincidence, a laughable fight scene at the end, the cops being given breadcrumbs to the witch’s house and still nearly missing it (figuratively obviously), and a highly improbable homeless man rescue.

All these elements together just made it a story coasting on a path where you know the killer from relatively early on and are merely waiting to find out what happens. The snap? Hmmm… that was pushing it. Plus the story is not finished off. And what made it worse were the number of exclamation marks and derogatory descriptions of people. I dived into this book really excited for a gripping crime story and closed it with pursed lips and a furrowed brow.

The Missing Sister by Lucinda Riley

Description from Amazon:

From the vineyards of New Zealand to the majestic landscape of Ireland, The Missing Sister is the penultimate instalment in the multimillion-selling epic Seven Sisters from Lucinda Riley. A breathtaking story of love and loss, inspired by the mythology of the famous star constellation.

They’ll search the world to find her . . .

The six D’Aplièse sisters have each been on their own incredible journey to discover their heritage, but they still have one question left unanswered: who and where is the seventh sister?

They only have one clue – an image of a star-shaped emerald ring. The search to find the missing sister will take them across the globe; from New Zealand to Canada, England, France and Ireland, uniting them all in their mission to at last complete their family.

In doing so, they will slowly unearth a story of love, strength and sacrifice that began almost one hundred years ago, as other brave young women risked everything to change the world around them . . .

 

It’s been quite a few years since I read the first six novels in the series, but I remember they seemed very formulaic and I was hoping that all would be solved with this “final” book which, as it turns out, is not the final one and does not answer much but leaves yet more mysteries to be solved.

I’ll be honest… it was a slog getting through this. So incredibly long with so much unnecessary info in it. The bits that were interesting were the historical retelling of the trouble in Ireland and the stories behind the sides of the family that you get to see through the eyes of generations. The childhoods and turmoil the families went through and the political angle thrust on them made for intense reading.

It was so odd that these sisters all thought it was a great idea to find this missing sister and pursue her across the world even though she had told them to stay away and that she was scared, thinking she was being stalked. Why would she take any interest in attending a funeral for someone she didn’t know and that she (and technically the others) were not even related to? Imagine someone pitches up and says I’m somehow related to you and now you must come with me to honour someone you’ve never heard of? Especially when you know who your family is? I’d run a mile.

But what was tedious was the repetition of things like people telling others how tired they looked, or someone saying they were perfectly capable of doing something, or the same event that had happened repeated by the other person from their POV. Or even the number of times food and drink were brought into the story – we know Mary likes toast as breakfast so please don’t tell us ten times! Or that Mary was called Merry so many times? And for goodness’ sake – do we have to have a summation of each sister’s backstory again?

Georg the lawyer could have solved all this early in the book yet chose to disappear “to find something out” and couldn’t be contacted. Really? With all this going on and the money being spent from the estate to track the sister down? Not to mention the “secret” Mary was hiding. Again, really? In this day and age, and considering she was on the other side of the world, why couldn’t she have done something about it or told her husband of thirty-five years? Thirty-five years and she couldn’t share something that “terrified her every day of her life”? Nope. The ending with Peter was not necessary. The whole meeting just took up space and could have been over and done with in one conversation. Ambrose and Father John, however, now that was a lovely part of the story.

I’m looking forward to having all the loose ends (and there are a lot) tied up as the premise behind the series is great but the execution has been so hard to get through. Pa Salt here we come…

Hunting Time by Jeffery Deaver

Description from Amazon:

THERE ARE TWO FUNDAMENTAL RULES OF SURVIVAL.
#1: NEVER BE WITHOUT A MEANS OF ESCAPE.
Allison Parker is on the run with her teenage daughter, Hannah, and Colter Shaw has been hired by her eccentric boss, entrepreneur Marty Harmon, to find and protect her. Though he’s an expert at tracking missing persons—even those who don’t wish to be found—Shaw has met his match in Allison, who brings all her skills as a brilliant engineer designing revolutionary technology to the game of evading detection.
#2: NEVER BE WITHOUT ACCESS TO A WEAPON.
The reason for Allison’s panicked flight is soon apparent. She’s being stalked by her ex-husband, Jon Merritt. Newly released from prison and fueled by blinding rage, Jon is a man whose former profession as a police detective makes him uniquely suited for the hunt. And he’s not alone. Two hitmen are also hot on her heels—an eerie pair of thugs who take delight not only in murder but in the sport of devising clever ways to make bodies disappear forever. Even if Shaw manages to catch up with Allison and her daughter, his troubles will just be beginning.
SHAW IS ABOUT TO DISCOVER RULE #3:
NEVER BELIEVE ANYTHING.
As Shaw ventures further into the wilderness, the truth becomes as hard to decipher as the forest’s unmarked trails…and peril awaits at every turn.

So, honestly, with the blurb giving us excitement about Allison on the run and Colter tracking her, it sounded like a good setup. I’d read one or two of the Colter Shaw books before, and they weren’t too bad. I figured since this was Deaver it’d be good too.

But I really don’t feel the same about Shaw as I do about Rhyme! There is something about Lincoln’s character that is a lot deeper and Shaw feels underdeveloped to me. I appreciated his survivalist backstory and how he integrates it and the fact that he works for “rewards” now but he doesn’t feel like he has enough substance. I think maybe Lincoln’s methodology and each piece of evidence makes it feel as though the cases are really solved through clues, while with Shaw’s case it wasn’t what he was looking for but more of what he was bringing to the party.

Okay, so the story has Allison and Hannah on the run from Jon after his prison release and him threatening to kill Allison. We know Allison has some secret about Jon and is some engineering tech genius, but her using these skills to evade a tracker? I think her skills were highly overrated and more often than not, she just used instinct and good sense. Hannah’s petulance and reliance on the internet was to be expected, and then her about-turn when she was learning all these new skills from Shaw and becoming one with them? Maybe. Just felt forced to me. The thugs following them must have been the dumbest hitmen out. Yes they could kill people but their conversations and actions (and the whole itchy skin thing!) were silly.

Deaver makes plot twists a thing. Then he started creating twists on twists and now he has so many twists in his books that from the beginning you suspect everyone and thus cannot get close to characters or invested in the books. It takes the fun out of loving or hating a character and at the end going “Oh no!” And this twist? Very flat I’m afraid.

When I closed the book, I battled to remember what the beginning was about, and two days later I actually had to read a few reviews to remind myself of parts of the book. That’s never a good sign. I want a book that blows me away to the point where days later I’m still asking why I didn’t see it coming. Oh well… I guess I’ll keep reading his books, hoping for a new one that is amazing. Not even Justin Hartley will save this one.

Hitman Anders and the Meaning of it All by Jonas Jonasson

Description from Amazon

 

It’s always awkward when five thousand kronor goes missing. When it happens at a certain grotty hotel in south Stockholm, it’s particularly awkward because the money belongs to the hitman currently staying in room seven. Per Persson, the hotel receptionist, just wants to mind his own business, and preferably not get murdered. Johanna Kjellander, temporarily resident in room eight, is a priest without a vocation, and, as of last week, without a parish. But right now she has two things at her disposal: an envelope containing five thousand kronor, and an excellent idea . . .

Featuring one violent killer, two shrewd business brains and many crates of Moldovan red wine, Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All is an outrageously zany story with as many laughs as Jonasson’s multimillion-copy bestseller The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared.

 

I had never read any of this author’s books but I was drawn by the font and the colour of the cover (not the one pictured here) so I figured I’d give it a go. According to other reviewers, this was not as good as the other books by the author, and based on this book, I wouldn’t read the rest.

 

Granted, there were a couple of moments I did have a laugh but I felt like I could have skipped over quite a bit. So in essence you have the receptionist and the priest. They are referred to by those names more often than not so I’ll leave them as such. The money destined for the hitman lands up with the priest and she decides there is a better way of the hitman receiving money and for her to skim as much as possible.

 

The hitman doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself other than be in jail, so tends to do things to get himself incarcerated again and again (but only in the maim not kill category). But now he has people after him and the receptionist and priest decide that, to save themselves, they need to work together and go into the world of marketing. After all, what better than to advertise the services of a hitman on TV? This will control the mobsters and hopefully bring in money, which they will handle (read into that take as much as possible). (The authorities seem to have no issue with this?) Until… the hitman discovers religion and decides that being a hitman is no longer for him. The problem is that they have taken money for hits that he now will not do. So… how do you use religion to make money? You start a church and ask for donations, of course…

 

And the plot goes from there. Some funny moments – the communion wine was quite something – but it fizzled out for me and I started hurrying just to get it finished. Then, when it was done, I actually didn’t even realise I’d read the last page as it was just over. Maybe it was the lost in translation part. Maybe it was the interesting first idea that spiraled and made the characters more and more silly as time/pages went on. Absurd or satire I can laugh at. This just didn’t hold my interest enough for the characters or the story. It feels like time taken from me I could have spent on other books. This might appeal to some, but to me I was never invested enough…

Dexter is Delicious by Jeff Lindsay

Description from Amazon:

Dexter Morgan has always lived a happy homicidal life. He keeps his dark urges in check by adhering to one steadfast rule...he only kills very bad people. But now Dexter is experiencing some major life changes - don’t we all? - and they’re mostly wrapped up in the eight-pound curiosity that is his newborn daughter. Family bliss is cut short, however, when Dexter is summoned to investigate the disappearance of a 17-year-old girl who has been running with a bizarre group of goths who fancy themselves to be vampires. As Dexter gets closer to the truth of what happened to the missing girl, he realizes they are not really vampires so much as cannibals. And, most disturbing...these people have decided they would really like to eat Dexter.

 

So I admit I’m very late to the Dexter scene. Had heard of the series but didn’t start watching it until recently. And I never realised it was based on books! So when I found this book (dumb of me to start on #5) and started reading and saw that Dexter is having a baby at the same place I am at in the series, I laughed. But the difference in which characters are living (or what physical state they are in) between the series and book makes it confusing. Plus the number of people who know his secret is odd. I don’t get why the kids would understand and agree with his “dark passenger” and both think it’s fine. It’s hard not to compare the series to the book because I don’t have the understanding of characters in the previous books, so all I can picture is how they were on the screen.

The inner monologue/voiceover is Dexter to a T, and really adds to the turmoil he is going through now that his baby Lily Anne has completely changed his life. A lot of reviewers said it made him too soft in this book but I think the concern he has that he could pass his genes to his child or that someone like him could “happen” to his child would make him more worried. I did find, though, that the story seemed to happen around him. He didn’t really do a lot in the story himself. And that is very different from what I would expect of Dexter, considering his willingness to make a plan to ensure something happens to the bad guy (I use guy as a turn of phrase here).

So... teenagers go missing and this leads to a club of vampires and eventually a group of cannibals, where we learn of fetishes to eat human flesh but also fetishes to be eaten. Deborah is fixated on rescuing these girls no matter the cost and also has no qualms about putting a toe over the line. I found this Deborah very overbearing and judgmental, and her constantly punching Dexter in the arm? Annoying. It might have been a sibling trait that ran through the books, but come on. Use it once or twice. Deborah also has someone she loves in this book and her feelings about Dexter’s baby bring up her maternal instincts. Deborah? Maternal instincts? Oh yes. And this leads to a revelation that will take Deborah on a path not quite expected.

Rita’s character is even more simpering in the book. On screen she is wishy-washy and her “powerful” moments are soggy at best. But in this book? Falling for Brian’s “dear lady”? Barf... I suppose she will be Lily Anne’s light to Dexter’s dark. But not an inspiring character at all.

Bad guys, rescues, getting off because Daddy has money... all part of the endgame. But sadly, the ending is easily guessable. Dexter’s drug-induced physical scene? Waste of space. Not necessary at all. And a certain character at the end wanting to help another after the stunts they pulled with them previously? Doubtful. Still not a bad book to read though, but not in the blood splatter/will he or won’t he realm of the on-screen series. I’d read the next book just to see Deborah’s path and whether Dexter’s mojo is darkened again, but wonder if characters are losing the plot...

Hunted by the Past by Jami Gray

Description from Amazon:

She’s a reluctant psychic. He’s the man who walked away. Can they see beyond their painful past to survive a sadistic killer’s lethal game of revenge?

No matter how far she runs, she can’t escape…

Changing the past is an impossibility ex-Marine, Cynthia “Cyn” Arden, understands all too well. Struggling in the aftermath of a botched mission, which cost her two teammates, her military career, and a fledging relationship, her world’s upended once more by a panicked phone call. The psychic killer behind her nightmares has escaped military custody and is hunting down her remaining teammates, one by one. Up next on his murderous list—Cyn.

Unless she can trust the one who walked away…

The killer’s game brings her face to face with the one person guaranteed to throw her off kilter—the unsettling and distracting man she left behind, Kayden Shaw. Once she believed he’d stand by her side, then he chose his job and secrets over her, leaving her heart scarred by their tumultuous past.

Can Cyn overcome her past to trust the man she loves and master the psychic ability she spent years denying before it’s too late?

Granted, it took me a while to finish this book as I was reading physical copies of others and doing book reviews, etc. so I had to come back a couple of times and reread things. The idea was great: a military unit with psychics and other supernatural-type abilities – sounds intriguing, right?

 

In the beginning there is quite the dramatic episode and you get to witness what Cyn can do. An interesting ability indeed. And you hear of her backstory and what happened to her leg and how she just wants to stay away from it all. But then the past comes back and people she never wanted to speak to again are once more in her life as a madman is after them and taking them down one by one. It seems the villain is in her head and she is struggling to differentiate reality from the past.

So the action is pretty uptempo and the fights are pretty believable (especially the physical damage afterward) but then the intimacy after the physical damage sounds, well… anyway…

Besides the dreadful punctuation and grammar mistakes, was Cyn’s constant anguish. Her being on the verge of tears and curling into a ball on someone’s lap to be held with his head on her head and his arms around her just became repetitive. I never felt a synergy between the team, and in fact, never felt close to any of the characters. They came and went and even the villain was one-dimensional.

The ending was over in a flash and it was, unfortunately, just not a book I would have sat down and been so engrossed in I could read from start to finish. I was hoping for more, considering the plot, but it was not the spectacular psychic thriller I expected.