Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez

'Blood Mountain' is the second book in the Jodi Luna series about a poetry professor who, after being widowed in her forties, returns with her daughter to her native New Mexico and becomes a Game Warden.

'Blood Mountain' is a good thriller that has the misfortune of standing in the shadow of the excellent first book. 'Hollow Beasts'. I had fun with 'Blood Mountain' and I'll definitely be continuing with this series but it didn't grip my imagination in the way that 'Hollow Beasts' did.

In show more 'Blood Mountain', Jodi has been sent by her boss to lead a weekend elk hunt for a family of billionaires who have bought up land in the mountains to create a 1,000 square-mile ranch on which they have built a behemoth of a 'Fishing Lodge' that they occasionally vacation in.

The Elk hunt faces some problems. The first is that the Lodge can only be accessed by a road that passes through the land of the only local who refused to sell the land her family has owned for centuries to the billionaires. She is a tough, eccentric octagenarian who speaks only in Bible verses, lives in a shack with her goats and a black bear that she raised from a cub, and has a habit of firing homemade arrows at people who pass through her land. The second is that a major snowstorm is likely to shut down the hunt and to cut the Lodge off from the rest of the world. The third and most important is that the billionaire brothers are aggressive, entitled, sociopathic narcissists who can't stand each other.

A lot of the fun in this book comes from the 'male billionaire freakshow' aspects of the story. At one time, I might have thought that their behaviour was too monstrous to be real Nowadays, all I have to do is think of Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr for everything to seem well-grounded in reality.

There is more to the story than billionaires behaving badly. Someone is trying to kill them.

The book opens with Dona öourdes Lavato taking her pet bear for a walk and finding the corpse of man with an arrow in his back. Then the action rolls back a day and we see Jodi being told to get herself out to the ranch.

The 'Who is the killer and what motivates them?' part of the book works well. Even though killing either of the brothers off might easily be seen as a service to humanity, there are lots of other people at risk who are easier to like. Inevitably, Jodi ends up being the only law officer for miles around. She has to find a way of keeping everyone safe and trying to find out who the killer is. This plot kept me guessing and also served to put Jodi under significant stress.

The part of the plot that required the biggest suspension of disbelief on my part was that Jodi brought her teenage daughter, Mila, to the elk hunt. True, it was on a weekend and there shouldn't have been anything dangerous going on and her daughter is kinda sorta the girlfriend of the son of one of the billionaires but even so, this seemed like a bad idea to me.

Of course, it was a bad idea that made for a much more exciting story. Mila is an engaging character and, from the events of 'Hollow Beasts' we know she can take care of herself.

I liked that Jodi and Mila effectively got a storyline each. It added to the tension, doubled the action and increased my emotional investment in the story.

Unfortunately, the story felt a little uneven to me. There were times when Jodi seemed less competent and less in control of herself than her daughter. Perhaps that's just realism given that Jodi is much more emotional than her daughter and was under a lot of stress but it still felt as if Jodi wasn't holding her own.

I liked the strong and slightly unconventional relationships in Jodi Luna's family They were vividly described, they felt real and they provided a contrast to the constant conflict and aggression exhibited by the bilionaires family.

Even so, there were points towards the end of the story when the Luna family relationships were so portrayed with so much sentimentality that I felt they were becoming candidates for living on Walton's Mountain. But that's probably just me. show less

I don't have a good history with books about Game Wardens. Three years ago, I abandoned 'The Poacher's Son', the first book about Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch because I found Mike so nice and so calm that he bored me. This year, I abandoned 'In Plain Sight' the sixth book in the series about Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett because I decided I really didn't like Joe anymore.

Still, I like the idea of stories about Game Wardens so I decided to try 'Hollow Beasts', the first book in a brand show more new series about New Mexico Game Warden Jodi Luna. Now, I have a Game Warden I can look forward to reading about.

'Hollow Beasts' was a breath of fresh air. What a difference it makes when your Game Warden is a Hispanic woman in New Mexico rather than a white man in Wyoming.

'Hollow Beasts' is also a real page-turner, As soon as I started it, I wanted to sit down and read it until it was done.

Some of it, especially the start, is a tough read. The plot involves a White Supremacist terrorist group that behaves like a cult. Their hate and acts of violence against women were graphic, credible and repugnant. I spent a lot of the rest of the book waiting for these guys to get their arses kicked. I wasn't disappointed.

This is an entertaining and engaging book. It's also one which seemed to me to have a clear agenda: expose the twisted thinking and behaviour of white supremacists fighting their 'war' against The Great Replacement', to remind people of the history of New Mexico, including how it became part of the United States, and to show how strong, well-armed, women can work together to put an end to violent men. Most of the time, that agenda provided more energy to move the action forward and to help to define the characters and the culture that they live in. Once or twice, it felt more didactic than that. If it wasn't so closely based on the reality of the current situation, it might have felt like propaganda.

It was rescued from that by two things: I liked Jodi and her daughter and the newly-returned-to-town police detective she was working with; the clever way that Valdés built tension throughout the book, keeping me focused on the action and the risk rather than on the bigger political picture.

Parts of the plot did involve some remarkable co-incidences, mainly with regards to things that establish key relationships for Jodi Luna. I was happy to swallow these because they didn't mess with the main action of the plot or its resolution and because the relationships that were established set up the potential for some interesting twists and turns in the next few books in the series.

I'll certainly be back with Jodi Luna in New Mexico when the next book comes out. show less

Lauren’s Saints of Dirty Faith, the third book in Alicia Valdes-Rodriguez’s Dirty Girls Social Club series, starts out with a bang and keeps moving. Valdes-Rodriguez knows how to interweave multiple plots in a way that keeps the reader turning the pages.

Lauren, fresh from a breakup with Jason Flynn, a Boston detective, is pushed into the subway tracks by a few Irish gangsters Flynn hired to get rid of her. But she lives. With the help of her friends, she flees Boston and heads to New show more Mexico, hoping to start over.

Rebecca, a wife, mother, and successful career woman, has grown apart from her sexy husband ever since she failed to first conceive, and then deliver through a surrogate, a perfect child. Her high-functioning autistic son fixates on sprinklers, unable to connect with those who love him most. To complicate matters, Rebecca discovers her father’s secret life, complete with half-siblings, whom he has been hiding for over thirty years, including a half-sister, Jennifer, who is infatuated with Rebecca’s husband.

Finally, Usnavys, a big, bold, colorful businesswoman, finds herself back where she started—in the ghetto where she grew up, without her husband, her children, or the money she has become attached to over the years once she loses her job, her house, her BMW, and her picture-perfect life.

How Valdes-Rodriguez manages to tell a thrilling tale of life and death adventure, heartbreaking family drama while documenting the very real lives of those caught in the grips of the Great Recession is what makes Lauren’s Saints of Dirty Faith the best of the Dirty Girls series. show less

I have a lot of feelings about this book and most of them aren't good. I come in biased because I tried to read Dirty Girls' Social Club many years ago and couldn't get through the first two chapters. This, being a memoir, is of course different, but I'm not sure if it's better.

The premise is interesting: an emotionally out-of-control liberal author meets a traditional cowboy with traditional values. They have a rocky road to falling in love and she ends up redefining her beliefs in feminism show more to a feminism that isn't really feminism at all.

I think I'm having the hardest time understanding how someone who was so successful in her careers could just up and torch everything she had with vitrolic words and purposely hurtful actions and not realize she was the cause of all of her problems. She's a smart gal. Why was nobody in her life telling her these things? Why did it take a man driving her to tears over and over and over again for her to realize this?

I don't know. It all sits funny with me. I'm not a "Men are all evil!" feminist, but I do think partnerships should be based on equality and mutual respect, and that doesn't really come across well in her descriptions of her relationship, no matter how many times she says that she fears that nobody will understand how kind and wonderful her boyfriend really is. Show me, don't tell me.

Speaking of, I feel like her editor gave up after the first few chapters. There were huge digressions into her past, academic treatsies on second- and third-wave feminism, and sloppy writing all over the place. When I read the work of someone consistently named to "Best Of" lists, I want it to be, you know, the best. In this case, I felt like it was piggybacking off the success of other real-life cowboy love stories (hi there, Pioneer Woman) without any attention to craft.

Oh hey, someone else needs my soapbox. Gotta go.

Added: So that relationship totally didn't last. Turns out he was completely abusive. And I am completely not shocked. But dude, they should take this book off the shelves because if a woman who was looking for relationship advice were to read this and take it to heart, they'd find nothing but trouble. Gah. show less