Ian Nash is having a remarkably bad day. He has been kicked out of his PhD program, which means no degree, no job, no income. As if that isn’t bad enough, when he stops at a local coffee shop to drown his sorrows (and maybe pick up a job application), he’s taken hostage by bank robbers. What else could go wrong?

Just about everything, in Blood Drama by Christopher Meeks. Ian makes a series of bad decisions: he’s smart enough to use his theater training to glean small details about his captors, but he can’t resist showing off what he’s learned, putting himself in grave danger. At least he’s smart enough to make his escape when the opportunity presents itself…but not quite smart enough to stay out of trouble.  Now he’s on the run with a vicious bank trigger man hot on his heels.

FBI Special Agent Aleece Medina wants to bring down this particular bank robber — The Busty Bandit — and she’s willing to fight dirty to stay on the case. Nash may be able to help, if she can keep him alive long enough.

I wasn’t sure what this book was trying to be. It wasn’t gritty enough to be a crime drama. It wasn’t wacky enough to be a comedy. And while Nash and Medina are drawn to each other, there was never enough heat for a romance. There are some funny passages, but I could never get caught up in the story.

Nash makes rash decisions that made me want to throttle him, while Medina bounces back and forth between fiercely professional and ridiculously smitten. I think Medina’s behavior bothered me more than Nash’s, precisely because she is supposed to be a professional. It’s clear that Nash can help in the investigation, but she should be able to find a way for him to help without endangering his life and without anyone else ending up dead. Instead, she takes him on a road trip, gets drunk, and flirts with him. Although I enjoyed parts of the story, I couldn’t like either main character enough to really be drawn in.

My copy of Blood Drama was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

WordPress and I are not getting along lately. I have had several posts just disappear into the ether. Others, like this one, are scheduled to post and just never appear. My apologies to the good folks at Tor/Forge for missing the review date.

Virus Thirteen by Joshua Alan Parry presents a scary vision of the future. Amazing medical advances have cured cancer and many other health problems, but they’ve left a frightening bureaucracy behind. The Department of  Homeland Health Care tackles smokers on the street and sends them to rehab. Patients who are obese, hypertensive, diabetic or depressed are corralled into “health retreats” that are little more than fitness boot camps:

“Now, the watch you just put on is actually a calorie counter. It has a computer chip in it, much like the identity chip in your wrist, that will help us monitor how many calories you’re burning during your workouts. How we work here is simple. You have a meal with four hundred calories coming up, but in order to receive that meal, you must burn at least six hundred calories. If, by the end of this session, you haven’t reached that goal goal, you will have to wait for the next meal.”

Perfectly in line with a lot of current thinking – that thin equals healthy, even though the facts don’t always support that idea.

There’s an undercurrent here. GeneFirm, the biotech company that cured cancer, is working on a cure for the flu epidemic that is sweeping across the country, but there is evidence they are not telling the truth. One of the senior researchers may have cancer…even though cancer has been cured. The firm is in lock-down, people are trapped inside…what is really going on?

There is plenty of suspense here and I think there’s a enough drama to make a pretty good movie. There are plenty of plotlines to keep you interested. There are the Logans – researchers at GeneFirm who may be at the center of something that will change the world. You’ve got MacDonald and Marnoy, our Homeland Health cops. Their job is to round up the unhealthy, but one of them may not be what he appears to be. They drag Pat and Modest to the health retreat, and they may end up on an adventure of their own. And on all sides, there is the virus, burning through the population. How is GeneFirm involved?

The problem for me with Virus Thirteen was that there is a plot hole here that was so obvious that it jolted me right out of the story. As soon as it came up (and I won’t share my thoughts, as it might not be as apparent to others), I had an immediate, incredulous reaction, and that made it hard to sink back into the story. I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them, but sometimes you just shake your head and think, you could have done better. However, even with the plot problems, this is a good, quick read with lots of potential. The health cops infuriated me, but I could almost see it, the militant attitudes that some people have, passing laws about soda pop and trans fats – maybe they aren’t that far down the road.

My copy of Virus Thirteen was an Advance Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

I was caught up in the book from the very first chapter. Terrier Rand comes from a family of thieves – burglars, second-story men, con artists and grifters. (All named after breeds of dog, for reasons that are never fully explained.) His brother, Collie, is on death row after a killing spree that included an elderly couple and a nine-year-old girl. Terry hadn’t planned to come home for the execution, but his brother has a last request.

The Last Kind Words by Tom Piccirilli is the story of that last request and the story of Terry coming to terms with his family. After his brother’s conviction, in the midst of his own personal crisis, he left town, ran away from his problems. Coming home, he can’t make things right; it’s just too late to be there for the one person who really needed him. He has to face the fact that other people suffered for his cowardice. His brother can still push all his buttons — he knows just what to say to get Terry to do what he wants. It’s really not all that difficult: Terry wants to understand what Collie did, wants some sort of explanation. First, though, there’s a question of the one murder that Collie swears he did not commit.

You can’t help but root for Terry and love his family just a little. The names — Terrier; Collie; their father, Pinscher; their uncles, Malamute and Greyhound; his grandfather, Shepher — are enough to draw you in. The open and honest way they approach their completely dishonest living is kind of charming and everyone in town knows who and what they are. Terry makes some terrible decisions, but there is enormous pressure on him, with the upcoming execution, concerns about his sister, his ailing grandfather and an uncle in trouble with the mob. He’s clearly trying to do the right thing, even without a clear idea of what the right thing might be, but he’s torn and fighting his instincts to run, like he did before. This time, he has to see things through to the end.

I really enjoyed the novel, over all. I was really engrossed in Terry’s family struggles, particularly his dealings with his teenage sister. It’s got to be tough growing up in such a notorious family, and a 16 year old does not want her runaway older brother coming home, trying to save the day. The failing health of his grandfather and uncles  is disturbing, as it is for all of us who are watching family members grow old. For men like these, what do you do when you can’t do the thing you’ve done all your life? Most of all, Terry’s final words to his brother surprised me. It was one of those scenes where you don’t know what you were expecting, but this wasn’t it. Overall, a very good read.

The title puzzled me until the end of the novel.

When the priest turned to go, I reached out and grabbed him by the wrist.

“The last kind words ever spoken to Jesus were spoken by a thief.”

“Excuse me?” He tried to pull away, but I held on. “You’re — you’re –”

“We were the first let into heaven. Thieves are pardoned.”

For Terry’s sake, you hope that it’s true.

My copy of The Last Kind Words was provided free of charge through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program..

Disclaimer: I voted for Carla Hall for Fan Favorite on Top Chef.

I loved Carla’s attitude and I loved the look of her food when she was on Top Chef. I always prefer the low-drama, high-teamwork folks who are focused on the cooking. Because of that, I was really excited to check out Carla’s cookbook.

Now, I am always a little cautious of anything that talks about comfort food. I love comfort food, but for me, that means mac and cheese, meatloaf, fried chicken, and food covered in good gravy. And I shouldn’t be eating that! I am trying to eat healthy, and comfort food is seldom healthy.

Not everything in this cookbook is healthy, but there is plenty of good stuff in here to cook. Carla talks about “lightening up” dishes by boosting the flavors and using smart cooking techniques. Besides, you wouldn’t really want your comfort food to be too healthy. It would lose most of its comfort.

I’ve only made a few recipes so far (the creamed chicken with broccoli and mushrooms, the groundnut soup), but I’ve read through the book and I love her stories and the recipe introductions. One thing I am really looking forward to cooking is “Swamp Thing” – how could you resist something with a name like that? It’s braised pork shoulder in smoked pork-corn broth with sweet potatoes and collard greens. It sounds fabulous! This is the dish that she made on Top Chef for the Ancestors challenge and I am going to wrangle one of my good cooking-buddies and give this one a try.

What makes for a great cookbook? Great recipes, of course. And I separate “great recipes” into two categories: things I can cook, and things I wish I could cook. My French Laundry cookbook is full of things I wish I could cook, but Cooking with Love is full of things I could make for dinner tonight. I want good pictures, very important, since you want to know what the final dish is supposed to look like. Clear directions are vital — good explanations of the process and no metric measurements. Finally, a really great cookbook tells a story. Sometimes, it’s aspiration, like the French Laundry book, or my books of Indian and Asian cuisine. Sometimes, the story is utilitarian. This cookbook tells a love story. It’s full of Carla’s love of cooking and her love for her family. Her stories and descriptions are a pleasure to read.

My copy of Cooking with Love: Comfort Food that Hugs You is from my private library.

Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd is the story of Lysander Rief, a London stage actor who has come to Vienna in search of a cure for his sexual problems. He gets his cure, although not quite in the way he planned.

Rief meets a crazed woman in his psychiatrist’s office, a Miss Hettie Bell, and from that moment on, Rief doesn’t miss an opportunity to make a bad decision. He falls into a passionate affair with the married Hettie, who later accuses him of rape. While being held under house arrest at the British Embassy, he becomes convinced that the case must not go to trial. Two embassy employees, Jack Fyfe-Miller and Alwyn Munro, help him escape Vienna and return to London…for a price, and Rief has no idea how high that price will be.

That’s the first part of the book and, for me, it was a slog. I was so frustrated with Rief making dumb decision after dumb decision! But I kept going and I’m glad I did. The later parts of the book are much more interesting, as Fyfe-Miller and Munro draw Rief into a complicated bit of espionage, trying to identify a traitor who is giving information to the Germans. This is where the story really gets interesting. Rief’s background as an actor is clearly helpful, as he assumes several different identities and disguises. Fyfe-Miller and Munro continue to turn up, and I began to wonder whether any of the prior events were really just coincidence.

An interesting thing happened, talking about this book with some friends. An online acquaintance, familiar with Boyd’s work, said he is “pretty good at bringing pathetic characters and their pathetic misfortunes to life.” So, apparently, Rief’s cluelessness was by design, not by accident. I don’t have much patience with watching a character being stupid over and over, but that’s me. It might not be a problem for other readers.

Overall, the book is very good. The writing about Vienna is beautiful, very atmospheric. The espionage story and Rief’s family interactions were far more interesting than his stay in Vienna, at least for me. The writing really rescues the story, and I would definitely be interested in reading more of Boyd’s work.

My copy of Waiting for Sunrise is an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

I am admitting defeat.

I have tried at least 4 times to get through The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food by Josh Schonwald. In theory, it’s the sort of book I should love. I am interesting in food and gardening and how the growing population of the planet will be fed over the coming years. I am also an unashamed foodie — I buy organic vegetables, free range meat and avoid farm-raised fish. I am intrigued by new cooking techniques. I figured this book would be a very fast read for me.

Unfortunately, this was not the case. The information is good — Schonwald interviews scientists, farmers, and various types of food engineers. He traveled, visiting farms and factories and fisheries. He knows his stuff, but he can’t seem to make it interesting. He just could not keep me reading.

I thought maybe the problem was starting with “The Bagged Salad Revolution.” I mean, I love a good salad, and I love finding new and interesting greens at the farmer’s market, but I don’t find the history of radicchio in the United States all that interesting. Much of what these chapters said seemed basic to me: you’ve got people who want to buy salad in a plastic bag that will stay fresh in their refrigerator for a month, and you’ve got people who want to buy fresh greens every weekend at the farm stand and would rather eat weeds than iceberg lettuce. No real drama there.

The problem was the same in each chapter I tried. We’ve all known professors like Josh, the ones who clearly know their stuff, but can’t seem to get you engaged in their lectures. This felt more like a lecture and less like an interesting narrative. I’m sorry that I can’t say anything more positive. I was really hoping to love this book.

My copy of The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

I love this quote. I have had people ask me what my favorite book is and I can never tell them. I don’t have just one favorite or a few favorites. I have favorites in a million categories and, depending on what I read day-to-day, I am adding new books to the list all the time.

“Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.”

- Neil Gaiman, author

Stephanie LaCava tells the story of her childhood — uprooted from New York to a village outside Paris — by focusing on the strange objects she collected and obsessed over in An Extraordinary Theory of Objects: A Memoir of an Outsider in Paris. It’s an interesting way to tell a story, but I ended up far more interested in the footnotes, the stories and histories of the objects, than I was in LaCava’s childhood.

LaCava is clearly an odd, solitary child. The sudden move from New York to Le Vesinet for her father’s work did not help matters any. (LaCava seems convinced her father was involved in some sort of espionage; I’m not entirely convinced that isn’t another of her youthful fantasies.) I found believing her stories about her obsessions with objects a bit of a stretch at times:

“I was obsessed with cabinets of curiosities, historical efforts to catalog and control nature’s oddities. A favorite example was the encyclopedic collection of rare flora and fauna that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II kept at Prague Castle in the seventeenth century.”

Really? Not even a teenager and she’s obsessed with obscure historical tidbits? I suppose it’s possible, but it seemed unlikely. I know that she wanted to portray herself as haunted and unusual, but she struck me as undiagnosed, more than anything. She was a depressed kid who took long walks alone at night, bringing home beetles and mushrooms and lockets. It’s sad that her parents seemed to have no idea what to do with her, and that made me a little angry. Maybe it was all for the best, maybe doctors and antidepressants would have taken away from curiosity and changed her unusual view of life. She seems to me to have re-imagined herself as one of her curiosities, going through life apart from all of us mundanes, and I found myself rolling my eyes instead of being moved. She seems less like an outsider and more like someone who just didn’t want to fit in.

The best parts of the book are the extensive footnotes, telling the stories of the objects she collects. And not just the objects she collects: while there are sections on beetles and mushrooms and cameras, there are also sections on pajamas, mustaches and teabags, which weren’t included in her collections.

An Extraordinary Theory of Objects: A Memoir of an Outsider in Paris is a quick read, but I didn’t find it as interesting as I had hoped. My copy was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

I’ll say it up front: I am a pack rat.

I come by it honestly. My father is a pack rat — he saves everything, and whenever you need some obscure bit of something, he normally has it. (Whether or not he can find it is a different story.) My mother is not one of us. She has no problems throwing things away; this is why I always invite her to come help when it’s time to do some spring cleaning.

I have worked hard to shed the worst of my pack rat ways. I still struggle with clutter and I probably save too many things, but I’m aware of it and you are unlikely to find me buried under a pile of old newspapers and rotting food. So when a friend recommended Peter Walsh’s book, It’s All Too Much, I was happy to give it a look.

I am of two minds about this book. First, there are some great tips in here. There is definitely a philosophy at work, which is really helpful in encouraging you to clean up. Clutter is stressful! I’ve always know that — it’s that itchy feeling when you just want to sit down and read and all you can do is look at the piles of stuff that you really should be sorting through. Having piles of stuff on every flat surface is not conducive to relaxing.

Walsh has some great strategies for cleaning and organizing: decide what you want to do in the room. That seems simple, right? But when you think about it, it’s more complicated. In my living room, I have my tv, my couch…and my computer desk. I have book shelves. I frequently eat dinner in the living room. So what do I really use it for? His plan is to decide what you use the room for, lay out “zones” where you perform different activities, and organize your stuff accordingly.

Where he and I part company is on his attitude about getting rid of stuff . “Be brutal!” he says. Why? That’s what I say. If I have room to store a whole shelf full of cookbooks and they make me happy, why should I get rid of them? He talks about saving one photo from a family event, and writing a paragraph about the event, and getting rid of the rest of the pictures. That’s a horrible idea! Granted, you can’t let your scrapbooking supplies take over your house, but that doesn’t mean you can’t keep a photo album.

I think the big problem is this: I do not believe it is somehow inherently better to not have things. I don’t think there is some special virtue in having an austere, empty house. I would like to be able to see the surface of my dining room table, but that doesn’t mean I have to throw out everything in my kitchen to get there. I think a lot of these experts really believe that you are better off not keeping things, and I don’t agree. Books are always a target and I love my books. I love having full bookshelves and I love being surrounded by books. I have no interest in getting rid of them in for the sake of having spartan bookshelves.

If you’re looking to dig your way out from under a mound of clutter, this is a great book. There are lots of good strategies that can be really helpful in creating a system to organize your home. Just don’t rush to throw away your family photos.

If you think of punch as something in bowl with ginger ale, melting rainbow sherbet and fruit juice, this book will change your mind. The Punch Bowl: 75 Recipes Spanning Four Centuries of Wanton Revelry aims to take you back to the glory days of punch, when it was brewed from spirits, spices and not-too-clean water. Our sanitation has improved and so has our taste, which leaves me eager to try some of these recipes.

The book begins with a history of punch, which is actually more interesting than I anticipated.

“…in its golden era, punch embodied all things exotic and expensive: spice, sugar, fruit, imported spirits, and, if the imbibers were trult fortunate, clean water.”

Punch bowls were considered the ne plus ultra of wedding gifts and when not in use for punch, they could be found employed as fruit bowls, ice buckets, even baptismal fonts. Some had metal straws attached and revelers drank right from the bowl (I think I’ve been to a few parties like that). While they were primarily beautiful containers of ceramic, glass and finely-finished metal, sometimes simpler but larger vessels were employed:

“And what could be more madcap or festive than a mossy, outdoor fountain converted into a massive punch bowl, as one Admiral Edward Russel did in the Spanish port city of Alicante in October 1694? Out came the ornamental fish and in went cask after cask of spirits, lime juice, sweeteners, and spices, as well as a miniature navy of boys who took turns sailing around the fountain in a skiff, ladling punch into cups for the attendees.”

I don’t suppose they washed…nah. Probably not.

The recipes are terrific and remind me of the classic cocktails that have come back into fashion. I love these old concoctions and recently surprised a bartender in an historic hotel by ordering a Harvey Wallbanger. Really fun. These are not the kiddy-punches you’ve served at wedding showers; they are primarily alcohol, without much in the way of mixer to lessen the impact. For example, Gothic Punch (from an 1862 bartenders guide) calls for 5 bottles of red wine, 1 bottle of champagne, 1/2 cup of sugar and 3/4 cup of orange juice. Spread Eagle Punch (you know that’s going to be a helluva party) calls for 1 bottle of single malt scotch, 1 bottle of rye, 1/2 cup of sugar, 1 cup of boiling water and some lemon zest. It’s basically one big cocktail.

The Punch Bowl is an excellent choice if you’re into classic cocktails or looking to make something special for your next party. Many of the ingredients are exotic and might require an order from a specialty store, but there are plenty of punches you could try with ingredients from your local liquor store. My copy was a gift — and one I hope to get some use out of soon!