Kelley Armstrong

Death at a Highland Wedding is the fourth in the Rip Through Time series by Kelley Armstrong in which she combines time travel with a cleverly plotted mystery to provide the reader with a very entertaining, very intriguing tale. Mallory, a modern day Vancouver police detective, while in Scotland, had been transported back in time into the body of a Victorian maid servant in the household of undertaker, Dr Duncan Gray and his sister, Isla. In past books, she had revealed her real identity and show more she has helped Duncan and Inspector Hugh McCreadie on several cases.

In this latest instalment, they have all been invited to the Scottish highlands for Hugh’s sister’s wedding but, shortly after their arrival, another guest goes missing and is later found murdered. With a houseful of suspects and an inexperienced local police officer, Mallory, Duncan, and Hugh quickly find themselves on the trail of a very clever killer.

Kelley Armstrong's books never fail to grab me and keep me fully immersed in the story from beginning to end. With plenty of red herrings and twists and turns, she does an amazing job of ramping up the tension to keep the reader glued to the page. The characters are complex and interesting as is the mystery and it is particularly fun watching Mallory trying to navigate through all the rules and manners of Victorian society, especially given the limitations placed on women, while working to solve a case without the aid of modern tools. A truly enjoyable and compelling mystery and I am already looking forward to the next book in the series.

I received an eARC of this book from Netgalley and St Martin’s Press in exchange for an honest review show less

CURSED LUCK begins a new urban fantasy series. Kennedy Bennett is the middle daughter in a family of curse workers. While they are able to place curses on objects, their specialty is removing them. Kennedy has moved from Unstable, Massachusetts, where she grew up to Boston where she has opened an antique store that specializes in formerly cursed objects.

Kennedy is just building her business. She finds it hard to turn down an offer to help Aiden Connolly, from a family of luck workers, find show more and uncurse the famous, or maybe infamous, Necklace of Harmonia. This object promises eternal youth and beauty but also great misfortune.

Despite Kennedy being attracted to Aiden's looks, they don't hit it off when they first meet. Kennedy is impulsive and sometimes even reckless and Aiden is the quintessential stuffed shirt. But when Kennedy's sisters are kidnapped to force them to try to undo the curse, Aiden is about the only one she knows isn't involved.

Kennedy finds herself involved in the gray magic world which is totally alien to her and filled with all sorts of competing factions who want the Necklace of Harmonia cursed or uncursed. She'll do anything to find and rescue her sisters - even contend with ancient immortals.

I loved the world building in this one where immortals and magic users live among us regular people. I liked Kennedy's attitude, intelligence, and sparkling wit. I like the way she interacted with Aiden and was constantly teasing him. I liked that there wasn't an insta-romance but that the possibility of a future romance exists. I liked the references to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Trek in the story. I liked Kennedy's relationship with her cat which provided some additional humor to the story. I liked that both humor and deadly danger filled the book.

I can't wait for the next book in the series which is due in 2022. show less

A unique idea, strong characters, a fast pace and well written scenes made “Made To Be Broken” a pleasure to read and showed that Kelley Armstrong is just as good at writing about thoroughly human monsters as she is at writing about werewolves, witches and demons.

“Exit Strategy” introduced Nadia Stafford, a disgraced ex-cop who moonlights as a hitman to keep her wilderness lodge business open, tracking down a rogue hitman with the help of her mentor, Jack and Quinn, an FBI agent who show more occasionally kills the people he can’t convict. I enjoyed the book but it suffered from an “Episode One, Series One” feel.

“Made To Be Broken”, the second book in the series, has the same characters and the same moral ambiguity but much faster pace and a more interesting plot with more surprises in it, but what sold me on the book is that I finally got inside Nadia Stafford’s head.

In most books, Nadia would be the bad guy, and a fairly scary bad guy at that. In this book, Nadia is working to do something good, rescue a teenage employee of the wilderness lodge and her baby who seem to have been kidnapped, but her pursuit of justice is entirely outside the law.

Nadia is not a vigilante. She is more like a professional carpenter volunteering her time to a charity building project except that Nadia’s professional skill is tracking people down and executing them.

The book is character, rather than plot driven. We learn a lot more about the things in Nadia’s past that formed her. We see her able to relate emotionally to other killers but being able to pull the trigger and do her job without a moment’s hesitation. Kelley Armstrong evokes the emotions Nadia experiences, making her human without making her a hero.

There are no sharp edges in the this book. Nadia sometimes behaves in a way that screams pyschopath and yet is capable of great empathy and compassion. The good guys are all breaking the law. The violence of what Nadia does for a living is contrasted with the picture of her relaxing among friends and lovers.

The story resolves itself but Nadia remains a hitman and her relationships with the men in her life remain “unresolved”, setting up the final book in the trilogy, “Wild Justice”. show less

It's been about four years since I read 'City Of The Lost', the first book in this series about a detective seeking atonement for and refuge from her past by living and working in a secret town hidden in the Yukon forests. At the time, I thought:

...it was an intriguing thriller in an original and compelling setting, populated with believable characters. The women are especially well drawn and the impact of abuse and guilt is shown with skill and empathy but without becoming maudlin or show more didactic.

I hadn't been planning to listen to A Darkness Absolute this week. I'd intended on having a genre-free week, but it's been very hot here and I decided to opt for an entertaining read instead.

A Darkness Absolute was entertaining, up to a point. It has a clever plot which kept me guessing about who the bad guy was. Even when I thought I'd figured it out, I still couldn't see how they would be caught. There was a black-tongued Newfoundland puppy called Storm. There was a mild but credible romance between the detective and the Sheriff. There were some good action scenes, a relatively strong sense of place and some truly scary people.

Yet, overall, it didn't work for me. My problem started with the nature of the crime at the heart of the plot: a man who abducts women, holds them in a hole in the ground for months at a time while he rapes, degrades and weakens them and then throws them away like trash when he's done. I suppose it's a tribute to Kelley Armstrong's writing that this evoked such clear images in my head but they're not the stuff of entertainment. Set something like that up and I expect the violent misogyny to be balanced by bloody, merciless retribution. To me, it felt like the plot delivered the mechanics of that but not the emotional impact.

I particularly didn't like that the rapist's behaviour wasn't put down to him being a biological aberration we'd all be better off without, but was blamed on the abuse he received from his mother and the lessons she hammered home that most women are whores. It wasn't that this was an infeasible explanation, but it felt too facile and too forgiving to me.

I felt that the pace of the book was a little off in the middle. The tension and the sense of urgency waned, replaced by mild romance and some puzzle-solving and second-guessing that felt bloodless, almost academic.

The plot and the quality of the narration kept me reading to the end but they weren't enough to bring this book up to the standard of Kelley Armstrong's other thrillers. Despite the additional details about how Rockton works and the development of the cast of characters who live there, I was left with no appetite to move on to the next book in the series. show less