Novels FReepers Love (discussion)

April 4, 2004 | me

[Jeff Head]

Thank you my friend...I'm busily working on Volume V.

[Long Cut]

I liked Coonts' first few books, but after Final Flight they sort of lost their spark. Seemed to be getting formulaic, and for God's sake, when does Jake Grafton ever retire? He has to have been in for nearly forty years, now!

There's only so many situations you can plausibly involve a Navy Admiral in!

[Trinity_Tx]

Then make sure to read Wilke Collins - Moonstone, Woman in White, No Name... Truly wonderful classic mystery/detective novels - some say the original. : )

[Pukin Dog]

Since hearing there was a movie coming out, I picked up a copy of Clancy's "Without Remorse".

[writer33]

"I've read it, and I have the DVD starring Antonio Banderas."


Yep. I love the movie too. It's just not one of my wife's favorite.

[Long Cut]

I've settled on a title for mine...Wild goose Chase. The title comes from the scene of a lot of the action, an old Soldier's and Sailor's bar which is actually a front for a crew of professional mercenaries.

The owner's son, who is a modern, sort of straight-laced 3-piece suit guy working for a modern security company, has to come to his rough-and-tumble old man and his cronies when he gets a particularly difficult assignment. His dad, whom he is estranged from because he doesn't like that kind of "dirty" business, has to then bail him out of a serious jam.

[Talking_Mouse]

Anyone else like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel? Its one of my favorite nonfictions. On the fiction front Lucrezia Borgia and the Mother of Poisons by Roberta Gellis. Its not what you think.

[Long Cut]

Hell, my wife loves it. I think she's just got a thing for tall, blond, blue-eyed Vikings.

Whatever, the character of Bulwiyf is one heck of an a$$-kicker in that one, and I can't think of any man worth the name wo will fail to be moved by the ending.

[Trinity_Tx]

"Without Remorse" is one of my very favorite Clancy novels... gets pretty intense at some points, but it is a great story. Especially for us Clark fans. : )

[Trinity_Tx]

I'll look for it. I didn't really like her vampire series, but I loved Servant of the Bones.

Even tho I had to be talked into buying it and let it sit on the shelf til i was desperate, lol. It turned out to be one of my favorites.

[RightWingMama]

I'll read it. It sounds like something I would enjoy. My husband and I are reading Jeff Head's books right now and they are very good.

[Jeff Head]

Sounds interesting and should be recognizable and interesting to many people given the visibility to this type of thing from the recent tragic events in Fallujah.

[Long Cut]

The Witching Hour takes place in the same "world" that the Vampire books do, but the Vampires don't make an appearance in it.

Rice only recently merged the two storylines, in Blackwood farm and more finally in Blood Canticle, which is actually the final book in both series.

Witching Hour actually has two sequels, Lasher and Taltos, which, after reading the end to Witching Hour, you'll want to read.

All her character's arcs are allegedly closed out for good in Blood Canticle. She wants to move on to other things, now that she's spent so many years with vampires and witches.

[Long Cut]

Those events actually inspired a change or two. i first wanted the son to be a CIA officer, but then I got to liking the idea of a contrast between the "modern" concept of a merc as an employee of a security corporation vs. the "old school" Dog Of War represented by the father.

I'm also going to toss in some humor as well. anyone who's been in the military for a while will tell you that there's no shortage of things to laugh at, and I like that style.

I absolutely devour books by guys like Carl Hiassen and Tim Dorsey for that reason...cutting, black humor runs throughout their work. it's like soice on the cake, to me.

[Long Cut]

One caution about The Witching Hour...for about the first hundred pages, you'll be wondering what's going on, despite a feeling of growing dread. Once she starts telling the history of the Mayfair Family, you will not be able to put it down.

You'll love the hero, Mike Curry, and you'll be really intrigued by the heroine, Rowan Mayfair.

And I GUARANTEE you won't see what's coming.

[Poohbah]

Actually, he just retired at the end of the last novel.

[Trinity_Tx]

<- Slapping myself in the forehead, lol. I did read that entire trilogy. lol I just think of it as the Mayfair Witches trilogy and forgot the title of the first book.

And yes, it was very good.

I was told a few nights ago that she wrote another like Servant... I cannot recall the name now, but it was one word and started with an R... the only thing I see at Amazon that sounds even close, though, is The Mummy or Ramses the Damned...?

[AnAmericanMother]

True enough, but a full length novel needs a little more to stand on. If that's the message, Kipling said it better:

CITIES and Thrones and Powers,
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,
The Cities rise again.

This season’s Daffodil,
She never hears,
What change, what chance, what chill,
Cut down last year’s;
But with bold countenance,
And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days’ continuance,
To be perpetual.

So Time that is o’er-kind,
To all that be,
Ordains us e’en as blind,
As bold as she:
That in our very death,
And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
“See how our works endure!”

[stands2reason]

Is it a stand-alone or part of a series?

[AnAmericanMother]

Being cursed by Christ on Golgotha apparently ain'tno joke.

Just ask Ahasuerus.

Interesting how Mel Gibson treated Longinus in The Passion.