I was hesitant to read Blood Kin. It wasn’t that I was afraid the book wouldn’t be any good but rather that it wouldn’t be as good as Shadow Kin, the book it follows in the Half-Light City series by M. J. Scott. Why’s that? Because Shadow Kin was one of the five best books I’ve read in the past year. Hands down.

Maybe top three…

The two lead characters in Shadow Kin – Simon DuCaine and Lily, a shadow wraith assasin – were so strong and so vibrant when together on the page that there was almost a fear that any other combination of characters would pale in comparison. Well now instead of Simon we have his brother Guy DuCaine, a templar, and Holly, a Half-Fae thief, who end up in each other’s life as simply as Newton supposedly discovered gravity. She fell into his arms.

rom there and across other rooftops and dangerous situations, the story of Guy and Holly unfolds and shows itself to be equal to all I hoped and more than I dreamt. Not only was this book just as entertaining and immensely readable as Shadow Kin, it sang in harmony with it and spun its own story all the while continuing the grander symphony that is slowly becoming the Half-Light City story.

Simon’s brother Guy shows himself to be much more than a one-note act. A strong and devout templar, he fights to save his city and family from the encroaching darkness of various alliances threatening the treaty that has kept the city safe, or at least as safe as possible.

Instead of the simple and one-dimensional “knight in shining armor” that he easily could have been portrayed as, we see Guy struggle with his own choices and emotions when confronted with the necessity of Holly not only being key to his mission of protecting all he loves, but also his own struggle of whether or not he can allow himself to believe the things he finds himself feeling for Holly.

And as for Holly, while I thought that M. J. Scott would have a difficult time ever writing a female lead as vibrant and alluring as Lily, I’ll be damned if Holly isn’t just as bewitching. Strong, deadly, sensual and more fully realized than many female characters in even the very best of this literary genre, Holly fairly leaps off the page and into the reader’s imagination and digs her heels there to stay for long after the story is completed and the book put down.

Blood Kin and its predecessor Shadow Kin – and pretty much any and everything written by M. J. Scott – is why I dared to ask whether or not it might be possible to review books in the first place. Ordinarily my reading tastes and habits are staunchly rooted in the things I loved as a child and teenager and the world of urban fantasy would never have otherwise been something I’d have opted to read… and my life would have been the poorer for it.

Smart, funny, dangerous, addictive and seductive in its languorous sexuality, I can think of no better book to recommend anyone to read this summer. I loved every single page except the last one, and that’s only because it meant the story was done… for now, at least.

Article first published as Book Review: Blood Kin by M. J. Scott on Blogcritics.

Even White Trash Zombies Get The Blues by Dana Rowland is just, well, weird. What it also is, is a blast to read, though, so aside from the whole “cute young girl zombie who eats brains and has a whole lot of mayhem, mischief and murder going on all around her while she simply tries to survive her (non)life all while not violating her parole” it’s got that going for it.

So, even the least astute of readers should easily be able to deduce that this is yet one more addition to the current zombie fiction genre. Everywhere you look on the bookshelves, it seems, there are zombies.

Admit it!

What’s not there on all those shelves and between the covers of all these books, however, is a good story with compelling characters that is truly and honestly well written. As luck would have it this is something that Even White Trash Zombies Get The Blues  has in spades.

It turns out that there is a hell of a talented brain churning out this book of brain munching goodness.

Angel is a young zombie that is dealing with the fallout of a few choices that left her dealing outside the bounds of the legal system all while trying to stay alive… or at least non-alive but in a still-moving-and-living-my-life kind of way. Which is why she’s on probation and why she’s doing her damnedest to keep her nose clean and keep her job as an assistant to the local coroner.

Well, a girl has to have some access to brains that doesn’t violate her parole in a blatantly obvious way, doesn’t she?

Monkey wrenches, or at least the zombie wrenches, are thrown into those plans as the simple discovery that a dead body doesn’t smell all that “brainy” even though the skull was fractured and should have smelled like a smorgasbord to her finely tuned cerebral palate, spiral Angel down a path laden with even more zombies, armed robbery, evil madmen intent on causing, well, evil, on an amazingly ambitious level.

All of which, mind you, putting her probation in serious jeopardy as it leaves our zombie heroine very little time to study for her G.E.D., without which she knows she’s headed for a date with her parole being pulled out from under her.

Did I mention her boyfriend is also a zombie and that his uncle (another zombie) have also entwined another tangle of motive and danger around her life that at times it’s hard to tell if the madman is the only one walking the path of doing evil? No, well I just did.

Fun, funky, fast, and reading like some amazing combination of the very best bits of Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter series and Charlene Harris’s True Blood series, Dana Rowland’s Even White Trash Zombies Get The Blues is just a fast and furiously good read.

It’s good for your brains!

(COME ON! HOW COULD I NOT WRITE THAT?)

Article first published as Book Review: Even White Trash Zombies Get The Blues by Dana Rowland on Blogcritics.

Matt Rigney’s In Pursuit Of Giants brought something out of me that I wasn’t quite expecting; a love for fishing. The reason that was unexpected was due to the fact that while I was around fishing all of my childhood I never learned to enjoy it. Actually, that’s not true, because the act of  fishing itself is quite relaxing and is a wonderful way to spend the day with your father.

For that reason alone I always wanted to love fishing, but I hated it because I could never bear to harm a fish. I know how hypocritical that is because I will always be the first one there when fish is on the table, but it always seemed cruel to me the way a fish would end its life on the end of a hook. Maybe that was just me and squeamishness, but it always seemed too much to bear as a child, which is why I would often fish with an un-baited hook in the hopes of never catching anything.

I hate fishing, you see, but I lived for spending hours on the water in a small boat with only my father and I in the middle of what seemed like nowhere.

My father, though, loved it. He loved everything, from the moment of planning a trip right down to the moment of pride he felt as he guided his boat perfectly onto the trailer so we could begin our trip home. And the fish themselves. . .my god how that man loved fish. He would hold the fish in his hands after unhooking it and just watch the sunlight glimmer like diamonds on the skin and scales of each bass or trout caught.

The love that Matt Rigney shows for fish, especially of the giant fish and true marvels of the water, in the pages of In Pursuit of Giants reminds me of my father in that sense. You can feel it through the ink of every page.

That love, however, is in danger. That is also something you can viscerally feel through the heft and seriousness of the book itself. All the while luring you in with a very tangible affection and sense of wonder for the creatures of the sea – especially those at the very apex of the “fish” family — Rigney drops the second shoe of knowledge that as a species we have drastically and perhaps permanently changed the sea and endangered the very existence of these creatures.

All of us think of the sea and the ocean as this permanent thing. Surely the ocean is too big for man to have influence and sway over; surely that is the one thing we can not be called into account over changing, right? Over all that water — or all within it, perhaps — there must be just as many fish now as there ever were. Right?

Wrong. Through modern fishing techniques and greed we have done to the watery depths what we have always done when we “want” something, and we know other people will pay for it because they want it to. Blue fin tuna.. say hello to the Buffalo. Marlin.. the dodo.. or even the carrier pigeon.

Of course, I understand i’m just glossing over things in this review because there’s no possible way I can go into the detail and emotion that Rigney manages to convey throughout his book. It would simply break my heart again, and I’m just not as talented of a writer as he is.

Hopefully, Matt Rigney will write many many more books because aside from the great story he unfolds through the pages of In Pursuit of Giants, the second revelation I found between its covers was my admiration for his writing.

It’s a sad story full of awe, wonder and amazing animals that might be gone within my own lifetime, and it’s a damned wonderful read for all of the tears that it caused to spill onto my review copy. I highly recommend this book and that we give thought to it and listen to its words of the possible change that could alter what seems to be an inevitable course.

Article first published as Book Review: In Pursuit Of Giants by Matt Rigney on Blogcritics.