Anyone interested in the history of the the harmonica in American blues will find the book interesting, but there was no reason to novelize the apparently real journey of the author. The dialog and novelization of a thin plot were the weakest parts of the book, and I had to skim past all the nonsense to get to the interesting historical nuggets.

This book would be 10 times better as a non-fiction documentary of the history of the harmonica than it is presented as a novel. As a novel I'd give it two stars but the earnestness of the author's love for its subject shines through and earns an extra star.

The book was described on the front cover as the "best thriller ever," and while its fine, its certainly not that. the main character is not introduced until a third of the way into the novel, and could have been better introduced and backstoried to explain his many talents, but the reader is supposed to forget everything in the first part of the book and follow the new plot with the new antagonist who is luckily good at everything and willing to go along on the mission at great personal danger for no real reason. The book gets good at the end, but the payoff is disappointing and completely unrelated to the set-up.

I tried to give the book a chance, but I really couldn't get past the writing style, being a first person narrative in the period, the prose was simply dreadful, and the action started too late and too meandering to force me to get past that.

A quick, competent espionage thriller that doesn't rely on forced action sequences (there is almost none until the final act) to tell the story. Enough to keep going.

Rogue Heroes is a great look into a very interesting chapter in WW2 and military history in general. The escapades by the SAS particularly in North Africa would fit right in with movies like Dirty Dozen. The book doesn't go too in depth in the details of each story, but give a great overview and perhaps a springboard into deeper reading.

Stockwin's Kydd series of books are always strongest once the characters get out to sea, but unfortunately the sea adventure is relegated to the side story while the main action took place at the British siege and bombardment of ostensibly neutral Copenhagen. The story brings to light an interesting and overlooked segment of the Napoleonic wars in the Copenhagen seas, but the sea adventure from the series title is sorely missing. A fan of the Kydd series should pick this up to fill in the story, but the casual reader could probably skip this chapter of the saga in favor of an installment that delivers more naval action.

This collection of stories was not at all what a waste expecting. A fan of Hammett and Chandler and classic noir stories, I was expecting atmospheric mystery if not classic detective. Instead there is just a collection of dark tales. Most with no mystery element at all.

Dodgers is touched with a hint of inauthenticity but doesn't suffer too much as a story from that. The characters are interesting with clear individual motivations and struggles. What starts as a "caper" ends as a character study.

Hunters in the Dark is an atmospheric journey through the Southeast Asia where the atmosphere overshadows the plot. In fact, the author uses the plot as a means to explore the setting and the characters as the primary focus of the novel.

Initial impressions are of a sappy, uninteresting teen romance masquerading as an intellectual period drama. The characters were uninteresting and the plot was missing, but the writing itself is fine.

Reads more like a tribute to Walt Whitman than a novel. Poetic at times, but at the expense of the story. Lacks a true narrative, just following the life of the narrator for several years seemingly aimlessly. Not a fan of the narration "I'm telling a specific person this story" style.

I tried to finish the book but just couldn't. It wasn't terrible, just unremarkable and boring. The characters were unrealistic and unrelatable. The main character skeptic trope just fell flat.

Pasha is a sea adventure that spends too much time on land wrapping up what appears to be a previous storyline from the continuing series. Fans of the series would likely be gratified by the events that open the first third of the book, but to a reader new to the series, its a bit dull. It picks up when the story heads back to sea, and I enjoyed the historical aspect of the novel, but while it may fit in well with the Kydd Sea Adventure series that it is a part of, it is not notable as a standalone introduction to the series for new readers.

Maybe I would be less disappointed in The Slickers if the extra long forward hadn't constantly compared the stories and the author to the all time greats of the "Golden Age" of pulp and adventure like London, Hammett, and L'Amour, but that comparison does the author no favors at all. Not having read any other writing from the author, I was really expecting a lot more from a guy with his level of fame and following. Overall it was just disappointing, and quite frankly, hackish.

No amount of "It's just pulp, its fun!" disclaimers from the publishers can fix what's wrong with the book. Pulp can be great writing and storytelling, and this is not it.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is a collection of fairly bland and forgettable short stories. The danger with short story collections is that sometimes an author will become too enamored with the freedom of the medium that they enjoy the experimentation with character study and themes, but forget to include a story. That was too often the case here.

Dog Days is a small town Gulf Coast take on the classic werewolf tale that does a better job at telling a teenage boy growing up over the summer than it does the horror. A stronger (and less confused) horror villain in the werewolf would have helped, as it was, the teenage bullies came across as much more menacing, but maybe that was the point.

While Clancy reps are unfair (though the posthumous "Clancy" branded books are dragging down that reputation), Tom Young delivers a nice, quick-moving military action thriller starring a likeable character that's easy and fun to root for. The action and military knowledge are believable and come across as authentic.

(Reviewing Audio Version) Night Heron is a nice, taut espionage thriller set in China. The author does an excellent job with setting the atmosphere, from the prison camp, to Beijing, to rural China. It moves at a good pace and keeps interest alive even with relatively little "action." The tradecraft is sharp and believable, keeping this in a more realistic espionage vein than James-Bondish super-spy action stories. I was engaged from beginning to end and would be interested in more from this author.

As for the audio, it was well-produced and read by Jason Isaacs, who did a good job throughout, even if his only American accent is "malibu surfer."

The Inheritor is a standard boilerplate near-future military/intelligence thriller following the terrorist attacks by Osama Bin Laden's heir apparent, who had been laying low with a giant cash fund, setting sleeper cells in America waiting for the time to strike. Which was now apparently. The terrorist attacks and federal response are realistic, the details of the novel are on point, but a big problem with the novel is that a lot of the details that the author chooses to elaborate on are the mundane day to day tasks of desk workers for an intelligence agency. There is no emotional connection to the characters, and two thirds of the way through the book, there is no real plot to speak of, simply a series of related events. As the first book of a planned series, it may serve as a prologue, but falls short of the incredibly high bar that Tom Clancy has set for this genre. Every author in the genre aspires to Clancy, but the events in the Inheritor only amount to the first several chapters of a Clancy novel, serving to set up the main plot, but certainly not its own arc.

Glorious is a fairly well-written Western that suffers for mainly serving as the prologue for a planned series based on the main character, a fact that is not revealed until the climactic scene falls flat with an unbelievable deus ex machina that side-steps the promised action with a reintroduction of the plot from the first part of the book which had been ignored up until that point and serves as a reminder as to who the real antagonist is, setting up the sequel.
The description of the life of a fading western boom-town is well done, and the transformation of the main character is well -written, but the book is let down by its ending.

Fans of Robert B Parker's Cole and Hitch series will like the continuation of the series picked up by Knott. Though Knott managed to recapture the feel of Parker's voice and prose, the feel was far less substantive. Cole and Hitch communicate just as quickly, but with far less meaning. The story itself moves quickly and entertainingly enough.

I couldn't decide whether or not I was reading a young adult novel (or pair of novellas rather), or just a simple adult pair of stories.

In the end the conclusion is that neither story has enough weight to carry their own book, and would have been better placed in a greater collection of short stories, as filler to a headliner.

A solid detective novel with an intriguing premise. Using the typical and seemingly straightforward detective novel standard of a manhunt to expand and explore the greater universe created by the impending asteroid impact makes for a good read. Definitely made me put the first book of the trilogy on my "to buy" list.

My main complaint with the novel is that of all the "mysteries of the old west" novels that preceded it, I was leery that there would be anything new, and there really wasn't. In addition to the standard fare (the fates of Butch Cassidy and Billy the Kid) that every preceding "mysteries of the old west" have covered to death, I would have hoped for something new and interesting and that simply wasn't there.

Pro-tip - "Random uninteresting person in late 1800s went missing" is not a mystery. Its the 1800s, lots of people went missing.

An enjoyable detective fantasy that manages to provide new fantasy elements (rather than simply re-purpose and re-use Tolkien's world as most modern fantasy is wont to do). Told in a sparing noirish style while still ably painting the Russian/Eastern European-ish fantasy world makes for a refreshingly new entry to the genre. I'll be looking to read the next in the series.

The Crook Factory was an engaging read that despite its length kept me engaged for the duration of the story. It did drag a bit with an extensive epilogue that was unnecessary, but I can forgive that with the idea that the author wanted to detail the real endings to the actual people and events used during the narrative. The interplay between the fictionalized account of Hemingway's amateur espionage ring and the real events and historical characters was interesting and would be to anyone interested in the intelligence saga of WWII. A credit to the author is that the narrative kept moving and new events/pieces to the puzzle were added just as the narrative might start dragging, and the main character figured out the various twists at the same time as the reader.

Terovolas could have had an interesting concept in a "weird western" horror tale, but fell very short. Recycled protagonists (Van Helsing) can work to take advantage of a built in backstory for the readers, but in this case felt stale. For a book this length, it took much too long to get into the action of the story, as the narrative style introduced the plot and villains much too slowly. When a reader picks a novel starring a known character such as Van Helsing, then the author should realize that the reader knows what sort of story to expect and should be able to jump directly into the meat of the story, skipping the slow style that the author chose in ignoring the built in backstory and expectations given to his main character when he chose to recycle another author's creation. The story and action picked up to the end, and the premise turned interesting, but for this reader it was too little too late.

Carnage of Eagles reads like it was written by an 8th grader. Not having read anything by the late William Johnstone before, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and blame the sophomoric prose on J.A. and the ghostwriter.

Being a big fan of Westerns, particularly the great Louis L'amour and Elmer Kelton, I thought this book would be right up my alley. I was wrong. Suffice to say that this is the type of cheap magazine rack pulp that gives the entire genre a bad name.

Tom Piccirilli creates a cast of characters that is instantly interesting; a family of thieves with a line they won't cross until one of them does. The story is very linear, following Terrier Rand as he struggles with his familial identity on his path to discover the truth behind his brother's brutal killing spree. The linear plot is helped out by a brisk pace, well-placed action, and a story that the reader is never quite sure where it's headed.

House of the Hunted is a spy thriller that though bogs down occasionally with atmospheric descriptions and a long list of characters that need to be named, described, and backstoried, moves through its twists, turns, and action sequences quite adeptly. While not groundbreaking, it delivers what any good spy thriller mystery should, and that's twists that keep you guessing.