Phineas Finn

The second Palliser novel, Trollope returns to London and the Houses of Parliament tracing the successes of young Mr. Finn of Ireland and his exploits in that esteemed body. It does make me wonder if our government would improve if we didn't pay our legislators a salary. I only regret that the novel failed to give me more of the characters introduced in Can You Forgive Her, but I look forward to revisiting Phineas in Book 4.

Soul Identity

I got this book free from Amazon. It was pleasant enough, but not so much that I think I'll seek out the follow-up novel. Despite the ancient almost Dan Brown-like mysteries/conspiracies the characters and plotting in the book didn't hook my interest enough to return to see what happens to this Templar-light organization.

Wolf Hall

I don't understand how this book won a prize, but it certainly does not recommend any of the runners up. This read like the scripts from the first two seasons of Showtime's The Tudors, but much more dull. And why the book is named after a place that never figures into the story is a mystery to me still, but not one I intend to waste any more time on trying to figure out. This book was yuck!

The Big 5-Oh!

I got this book for free on the Kindle and you get what you pay for. This book was so predictable, so diabetes inducing sweet it was torture finishing it. And it committed major crime in my book by completely failing to understand how hurricanes and hurricane season works. You dumb author there are no hurricanes on the west coast of Florida in the winter; if there is it's name isn't Millicent, and if there is they don't show up without any warning, nor does the power company manage to restore power in under 24 hours only with the storm planning to hit again. This level of lack of attention to detail just about sent me over the edge. Maybe I'm just terribly cynical, but this is not my type of book and for this type of book this was terrible.

Killer View

The second Walt Fleming Sun Valley mystery. This was even better than the first novel, and best of all ended without petering out like the first one did. The fleshing out of Sherif Walt was needed and appreciated. The main story was interesting and peppered with enough twists and turns to keep the story moving. While I won't run out and read Killer Summer right away, I do look forward to it.

Ape House

Sara Gruen's novel Water for Elephants was a great read. Ape House was not. They are very different novels, Elephants being essentially historical fiction and Ape being satire. With Ape House I just didn't care much about the characters, most of which were caricatures rather than actual characters, and the action continually devolved from the potentially serious to the ridiculous. Ultimately harmless, but not meaty and satisfying the way Elephants was.

Strip Jack

The 4th Rebus novel returns to Edinburgh and introduces us to The Pack, a very interesting and entertaining group of school friends from Fife and their foibles. Rankin does a great job of giving us just enough personal information about Rebus and those he works with and the mystery of the week. Another enjoyable read, and I look forward to the next.