Abandoned - Cody McFadyen

Smoky Barrett is an FBI agent with a violent past - her husband and child were murdered several years earlier, and Smoky's own face was permanently scarred by the killer. As this book opens, Smoky is attending the wedding of one of the FBI's own, and the venue is filled with law enforcement as an injured woman stumbles down the aisle. She'd been missing for eight years, and her then-husband has since had her declared dead and remarried. As Smoky and her team focus on the apparent kidnapping, they discover a killer that operates a business without any sense of humanity. I did figure out parts of this novel, but enjoyed it nonetheless.

Remembering Wadsworth - Caesar A. Carrino

I have been a resident of Wadsworth Township since 2002, and live in a home just next to the former Pardee farm on what used to be Stony Ridge Road. When we moved here, we signed a document that disclosed that the area has been tunneled through with coal mines, but that the locations of many of them are unknown. This author is a former mayor of the town of Wadsworth, and tracks the town from its settlement in the early 1800s though the 1900s. While it is a short book, it was intriguing to learn the College Street is indeed named for a college that used to be located there (now the site of Isham Elementary School). Learning just a bit about the rise and fall of some of the smaller towns in the area (Western Star, River Styx, Clark Corner) was great as well. Certainly this book has a limited geographic, but those from the area should definitely see what this town used to be like.

One If By Heaven, Two If By Hell - Rick Maydak

I just couldn't get into this one at all. I tried, I really did, but nothing held my interest. I think the premise was interesting and had potential, but this book just did not follow through. Can't say I would recommend this at all. The cover art however, is beautiful. I would love to see a larger print of this artwork.


Book not great, art fantastic.

House of Reckoning - John Saul

Back in high school in the mid-eighties, I picked one of this author's books up from my parents' collection. I've liked John Saul ever since, but this book felt like too many of his other novels. Sarah, a 14-year-old finds herself crippled and in a foster home, after her father becomes a guest of the state penal system. Of course, her foster family is abusive and dysfunctional, and, of course, there is a old insane asylum across town that offers a solution. It is a simple formula, and the result in this case was a pretty simple story.

Sworn to Silence - Linda Castillo

This was actually pretty good. A simple thriller with serial killer and a cop with a secret in her past. What really made this interesting to me was that the setting was Amish country Ohio, no more than about 10 minutes from where I live. While the main town was fictional, the surrounding areas mentioned were real and I could relate to them. You often don't find the Amish in this type of fiction so that was a different twist.

As a thriller, this wasn't too bad. The twist, while not completely expected wasn't too far fetched and was in the back of my head, yet I didn't think it was real likely of an outcome, yet it was so that nice. I would recommend this to others and look forward to her Linda's future novels.

The Gates - John Connolly

While trick-or-treating a few days before Halloween, Samuel Johnson happens upon a few of his neighbors enacting a strange ceremony in their basement, culminating in a portal opening and Samuel being pursued by the former Mrs. Abernathy. As it turns out, the Great Malevolence (i.e., the Devil) is harnessing the power of a particle collider to open a doorway and take over the Earth. His only challengers are Samuel, a couple of his friends, and an exiled demon with a love for jellybeans. The story is similar something that Christopher Moore or A. Lee Martinez might write, and a fun, albeit brief, read. Great for the Halloween season!

And Another Thing - Eoin Colfer

Douglas Adams is one of my favorite authors, but regrettably passed away suddenly in 2001. For eight years, I've continued to check the beginning of the SciFi section at the bookstore, hoping to find that a forgotten work was found and published. No luck there. Mr. Colfer has written the 6th book in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (for the uninitiated, yes, Adams wrote five books in what started as a trilogy). First a positive comment - it was good to run into the whole gang again, even if much of the book seemed to be key players and events from earlier books held together by a loose storyline. The characters were there in name, but they weren't quite "right" in many respects - Ford and Zaphod seemed quite different to me. The story also didn't contain the wit that Adams captured in the 1st five books, and I don't believe that there was a single quotable piece of dialogue. To be fair, this wasn't a bad book, but when you're stepping into the shoes of someone like Adams, you can be almost certain that the shoes will never fit just right.