What: Readers Imbibing Peril (RIP) III Challenge
When: 1 September – 31 October 2008
Who: Carl (Stainless Steel Droppings). Post reviews at R.I.P.ing Yarns.
This is my first time participating in the RIP reading challenge.
This year, participants were asked to list a pool of potential books to read, and decide which of the “perils” to undertake. I chose Peril the First, which was to read four books in two months.
I was really looking forward to reading all the books listed. Sadly however, several of them couldn’t hold my interest and I did not finish them.
Of the four books I finished, Twist was my favorite — though I wasn’t disappointed in the others. In fact, I can’t even say which was my least favorite.
Would I participate next year? Definitely.
RED books are on multiple reading challenges:
Twist by Colby Hodge {2 Sep 08} (REVIEW)
Night Keepers by Jessica Andersen {12 Oct 08} (REVIEW)
The Devil’s Footprints by Amanda Stevens {21 Oct 08} (REVIEW)
Personal Demons by Stacia Kane {13 Sep 08} (REVIEW)
Dead to Me by Anton Strout (DNF)
Night Life by Caitlin Kittredge (DNF)
Suspense and Sensibility by Carrie Bebris ***
The Rest Falls Away by Colleen Gleason (DNF)
*** = Read at a later date.
The Devil's Footprints
Author: Amanda Stevens
Copyright: 2008 (Mira); pgs.377
Series: N/A
Sensuality: N/A
Who: Sarah DeLaune
Where: New Orleans and Arkansas
From the back: In 1922 a farmer in Adamant, Arkansas, awakes to a noise on his roof and finds his snow-blanketed yard marked with thousands of cloven footprints. The prints vanish with the melting snow. . .only to reappear seventy years later near the gruesome killing of Rachel DeLaune. Years after her sister’s unsolved murder, New Orleans tattoo artist Sarah DeLaune is haunted by the mysteries of her past. Sarah as always believed that her sister was killed by a man named Ashe Cain. But no one else had ever seen Ashe. He had “appeared” to Sarah when she needed a friend the most, only to vanish on the night of her sister’s murder. The past bleeds into the present when two mutilated bodies are found near Sarah’s home, the crime scene desecrated by cloven footprints.
Comments: Sarah DeLaune was always an outcast, even in her own family. Rachel was Judge James DeLaune’s pride and joy. There was nothing that Sarah could say or do to make her father love her. The only person who understood her was Ashe Cain, the mysterious stranger she met one day while out walking her dog, and never saw again after her sister’s murder. Sarah begins to question whether he was real or not, and if he wasn’t, does that make her the killer?
Sarah’s past comes back, in more ways than one, when her former lover — and homicide detective — Lieutenant Sean Kelton asks for help on his new case. The victim has tattoos, and Sarah knows the handiwork of all the local artists. Sean and Sarah had been in in relationship for two years before Sean walked out. Sean had looked into Rachel’s murder, but things weren’t adding up and Sarah wouldn’t confide in him. Sean also has his own troubled past that played a part in his leaving. He still cares about Sarah very much, and neither has really gotten over the other. If they both can overcome their pasts, they might have a second chance at a life together.
Sean and Sarah aren’t the only characters with troubled pasts. Nearly everyone we meet has some trauma in their past that helped conceal the identity of murderer. There were several times where I feared for Sarah’s safety because the author kept me guessing. I was shocked when I learned the identity. I never would have guessed, and that’s rare. Very creepy book, but I enjoyed it very much.
Teaser Tuesdays post.
Started: 14 October 2008
Finished: 21 October 2008
Rating:
Liked A Lot
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Nightkeepers
Author: Jessica Andersen
Copyright: 2008 (Signet); pgs. 443
Series: 1st in The Final Prophecy
Sensuality: Warm
Who: Leah Ann Daniels (detective) and Striking Jaguar (Nightkeeper)
Where: Miami and New Mexico
From the back: As a Miami narcotics detective, Leah Daniels never knows how her day will turn out. But she certainly doesn’t expect to be strapped to a stone altar as a human sacrifice in an ancient Mayan ritual meant to coax a demon from the underworld — or to be saved by a handsome warrior-priest king, who claims to recognize her from his visions. Striking Jaguar thinks he is the last of the Nightkeeper warrior-priests, but as the end-time approaches, his mentor reveals there are twelve others. In reuniting them, Strike — king by birthright — gains the power to summon a Mayan god to combat the demons. But the woman of his visions is the gods’ chosen sacrifice. Now he must decide between love and duty. . .or find another way to invoke otherworldly magic in a death-defying race against the end of time.
Comments: This is the first book in a new series based on the Mayan belief that the world will end in 2012, on the Winter solstice. It’s labeled as a romance, but if you like your hero and heroine to spend most of the book together, and be the focal point of the story, this may not work for you.
Strike’s first responsibility is to his gods and to his people. After rescuing Leah, he reluctantly returns her to Miami, accepting the fact she will be safer there than with him. Jox, Strike’s winikin (mentor/guardian/servant), is a traditionalist and agrees that Leah, a regular human and NOT a Nightkeeper, has no business in their world. But the gods must have a different opinion on that, because Strike and Leah have been dreaming of each other. If the gods didn’t want her to be his queen, Strike reasons, why is she constantly in his thoughts? That line of reasoning doesn’t help him convince Jox that Leah belongs with the Nightkeepers. Given the fact that King Scarred Jaguar — Strike’s father — had visions that led his people into near annihilation, Strike meets with resistance to this idea. Jox is hoping one of the female Nightkeepers will interest him enough to forget the outsider. After coming to Leah’s aid for the third time, Strike’s had enough and insists that Leah is staying with the Nightkeepers whether the others like it or not.
Leah is a cop, trying to take down what she thinks is a serial killer. She doesn’t know magic exists or that the Mayan end-time prophecy is real and not something a bunch of cultists — led by a guy calling himself Zipacna — latched onto in order to justify their actions. After being rescued the first time, Strike had her memory altered so she wouldn’t remember the horror of almost being sacrificed. Because Leah’s a cop, she still pursues the case. But even if she didn’t, Zipacna would still be after her. The gods HAVE a purpose for Leah. A purpose she learns about, once her memories are restored at the Nightkeeper compound: if she’s sacrificed by the Nightkeepers, and not Zipacna, the end-time clock will stop, the demons will not be released, and there will be life after December 21, 2012. Strike’s having none of that. He still contends that his visions suggest that they are meant to be together.
Not only is he coping with the possibility of sacrificing the woman he’s falling in love with, Strike’s also dealing with the other inexperienced Nightkeepers. For the most part, they are a group of twenty-somethings, babies or toddlers when their parents were killed in the massacre. Most of the winikin raised their charges as godchildren, telling them stories of the Nightkeepers, without revealing their link to those stories. All of them had “normal” lives that got interrupted when Strike summoned them. Several of them don’t even want to be there, including Strike’s older sister Anna, who went away to college and never came back. As the autumnal equinox approaches, the group is still not functioning as a team. Strike, who hasn’t officially taken on the roll of king, is more interested in finding an answer to Leah’s problem and leaving the training to the others. It takes Leah’s outsider perspective to finally move things in the right direction.
Since this is a romance, I never doubted that Strike would refuse to sacrifice Leah. And since this is a series with a battle between the forces of good and evil for the fate of the world, I knew up front that the end-time countdown wasn’t going to be stopped in this book. I really enjoyed the mythology, the world building, and the epic feel of the story. Besides Strike’s and Leah’s point of view, the author gave us several other perspectives. We get inside the heads of Jox, Anna, and Anna’s grad student Lucius — who I think will play a larger roll at some point. We also got the POVs of the other Nighkeepers and some of the winikins. There are two Nightkeepers at the compound, Michael and Jade, who are mysteries because the author did not give us their perspective. And then there is Sven. Some tantalizing tidbits were revealed, but they weren’t developed further. I’m interested to see how that’s going to play out. There are a lot of characters and I can understand that not all of them could be developed in the first book.
Included is a preview of the second book, Dawnkeepers.
Started: 23 September 2008
Finished: 12 October 2008
Teaser Tuesdays Entry
Rating:
Liked A Lot
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Teaser Tuesdays asks you to:
Grab your current read.
Let the book fall open to a random page.
Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
Please avoid spoilers!
The teaser:
From where she stood now, she could still see the strange message on the wall behind her reflection. I am you.
– from page 53, The Devil’s Footprints (Amanda Stevens)
Why I picked this book: I’m reading this book for the RIP III Challenge.
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Personal Demons
Author: Stacia Kane
Copyright: 2008 (Juno); pgs. 303
Series: Megan Chase #1
Sensuality: Warm
Who: Dr. Megan Chase and Greyson Dante
Dr. Megan Chase is a psychologist and a psychic, which comes in handy when treating her patients. She reluctantly agreed to be the host of “Personal Demons,” a call-in radio show, not wanting to subject the “male Nurse Ratchet of local counselors” on the truly afflicted. The show promises to help “slay your demons”. If hosting the show wasn’t bad enough (mostly crank callers and heavy breathers), the station wants her to do an interview — a feature article really — with a reporter from a tabloid-type newspaper. It will involve a photo shoot and the reporter, Brian Stone, following her around for the “week in the life” part of his article. Megan is definitely not thrilled by this prospect. She has patients to take care of and a few things in her own past she wants to stay in the past.
A handsome stranger, looking for all the world like a lawyer, tells her that he represents someone who is very interested in the show — more precisely, her — and would like to discuss a business arrangement. Too tired and in no mood to talk, Megan manages to shoo Greyson Dante off with a promise not to accept any other offers until they get a chance to speak again. What she doesn’t know is that demons are real; that the term, “personal demons” wasn’t just a euphemism for psychological problems. Everyone has a little demon on their shoulder (except, oddly enough, Megan). It’s one thing to keep the demons at bay with therapy and counseling; it’s something else entirely to offer to “slay” them. Apparently, the demon world is taking the term literally and they believe Megan is out to get them.
Weird, freaky things begin to happen and Megan’s life is in danger. Greyson seems sincere in his offer to help her. Megan is sure he has an agenda, but she smart enough to know that she can’t protect herself against the demons. She accepts his offer while trying to ignore the attraction. Greyson flirts with her, making it clear that he’s interested. He assigns a trio of guard demons to keep an eye on her. At first, Megan’s uncomfortable with the arrangement but after awhile, she forms a bond with them.
I really liked this book. I liked the concept of the personal demons and the world building in general. I liked the characters. Megan isn’t a kick-butt heroine, but she’s strong in her own way and she has a true desire to help people. Malleus, Maleficarum, and Spud — the trio — add a touch of humor.
Looking forward to the second book.
Started: 12 September 2008
Finished: 13 September 2008
Rating:
Liked A Lot
