Book Review: The Winter Creek Beast

It’s not too unusual for a hiker to go missing in the woods around Winter Creek, but when a local celebrity famous for his big game hunting turns up dead, the apparent victim of a bear attack, Sheriff Jay Lightfeather can’t help but wonder if there is something more going on. When he visits his grandfather for advice he starts to wonder if the legends of his people might just be true.

THE GOOD

This novella is a sharp and quickly paced thriller revolving around a popular pair of legends that keeps the reader on the edge of his seat. It is never easy to make characters stand out in a novella, but the author manages to make the main character stand out in even the short number of pages in this book. The monster is vicious and deserving of place in the pantheon of campfire ghost stories.

THE BAD

The only thing I can complain about with this story is that it is not long enough. I would love to see this redone, drawn out, and made into a full blown novel that kept me reading for days rather than hours.

THE TAKEAWAY

Its a good read for a lazy weekend afternoon, but for the $1.99 price point I would like to see it a little longer. I would definitely recommend picking it up, because you just can’t go wrong with anything written by C. P. Bialois.

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Book Review: Souls of Darkness

Taiya looked furious. She stood in front of Alex’s house, waiting for him to go in, but he refused.

“I’ll take you home.”

“I don’t need you to take me home.”

“But I want to.”

“Alex, please, it’s getting dark.”

“I’m not afraid of dark.”

“You’re so pigheaded.” Taiya rode away.

“Will you at least tell me why I can’t be out after dark?” Alex said, having a hard time with the holes, which Taiya seemed to know by heart.

“Because of a very evil spirit.”

“Oh, c’mon. We’re running from a ghost?”

“Spirit.”

“Whatever.”

When they reached Taiya’s house, the door swung open and Kala, her mother, loomed in the doorway. She glared from Taiya to Alex. Now that’s scary.

“Don’t bother. He doesn’t believe in spirits.” Taiya left her bike and ran in through the door without giving Alex as much as a glance.

“Go home, Alex. Now,” Kala said, before she banged the door shut, leaving no room for discussion.

Offended and humiliated, Alex started on his way back. “Stupid people. Stupid beliefs. And stupid lack of lights,” he mumbled, as his front tire hit a hole and he realized he couldn’t make out the road. The lack of street lamps would be a definite reason to get home before dark.

Alex had his eyes glued onto the ground when he heard the high-pitched whistle split the air, followed by a gust of icy wind that made his bike wobble. This is not happening. The wind picked up, and he lost his balance. In slow motion, the bike fell sideways.

Alex tried to move his arms to cushion the fall, but his hands seemed glued to the handlebar. A sharp pain gripped his right upper arm as he landed on a rock.

He looked around, terrified, while he scrambled to get up. The high-pitched whistle stopped and the wind died down as he lifted the bike.

“Whatever.” He peddled as fast as he could, while struggling to stay on the road. His arm ached every time he swerved. He expected to see the lights from his house at any moment, at least the ones from the porch, but there were none, only pitch black. Maybe the trees were blocking them, or maybe his mother hadn’t turned them on yet.

He gasped when he saw two gray shadows speed across the road, a few feet ahead of him. His bike wobbled, as he pivoted to see where they’d gone. He could fight one guy, but not two. What did they want? Why not just attack him?

Beaty, Eleanor T (2013-02-05). Souls of Darkness (Kindle Locations 593-621).  . Kindle Edition.

souls of Darkness Front Cover

Taking a trip to a strange and exotic land can be a life altering experience. The everyday things you take for granted in your home town might be different or not even exist in the land you visit. Music, politics, technology, food and religion can be unlike anything you are familiar with and might leave you wishing you had just stayed home. If you were Alex, the main character of Eleanor T. Beaty’s Souls of Darkness, you would have wished that and then some before you even reached your final destination.

Book Review: Kingdom of Rage

Out of the hundred or so e-mails he received daily, nine out of ten were fun to read. The entire process took about twenty minutes to go through.

One caught his attention that he couldn’t quite process. It was neither fan nor hate mail. The subject read: Your presence is needed.

The sender expressed his gratitude for Rich’s involvement with local charities and community outreach. At the end, Waelim, the author, asked Rich for help in organizing a social uprising. Their movement needed him in order to gain traction and credibility. It wasn’t often that people requested his assistance, but this was different. Rich scanned to the end of the message and found the man’s signature and tried to figure out where he was from. Iran? Egypt? Middle East? New Jersey, maybe? That’s odd. There was a blog and Facebook link, a video attachment, and a headshot, but he hesitated to click it for fear of a virus. He read the message again, perplexed as to why his help was needed, then realized that the sender said he was from Saudi Arabia.

“Why the hell does he want my help?” Rich mumbled.

Instead of clicking on the link, he copied and pasted the man’s name into Google on a new tab and waited for the results. An instant later, the various links for his blog and Facebook account were displayed.

Rich took another sip of his drink. “Here goes nothing,” he said, and clicked on the blog link. Sure enough, the same person who had written him was on the page. There were various links, as well as YouTube videos and pictures of the man and others. He hit the back button, found the Facebook link, and clicked it. He was relieved his computer hadn’t done anything weird—so far. The same videos and pictures that were on the blog reappeared on Facebook, so at least more than likely the man was who he said he was. But Rich’s gut was telling him that he was on to something, and he was determined to figure out if it was a hoax. But how? Any schmuck with a computer and knowledge of basic Photoshop could put this together.

“Aw, screw it,” Rich said. It wasn’t every day a challenge like this presented itself, plus the investigative reporter in him was chomping at the bit.

Josh Handrich (2012-11-10T22:25:11.443889+00:00). o 29ed0fc4c826768d (Kindle Locations 133-151). Kindle Edition.

 

There is a lot going on in the world today, and it is harder than ever to tell the difference between your enemies and your friends; at least when you’re talking on the world stage. When reporter Rich Fordham goes after the story that would cement his name amongst the greatest stars of television journalism, he gets caught up in a plot that twists and turns  until Rich is no longer sure exactly who he can trust.

Book Review: COAST: An Act of Burial

 “The name of the ship is the Fort William” said Sutton, passing McKinley an intelligence dossier. “Royal Fleet Auxiliary supply vessel. We’ve just got hold of what appears to be the wreck site on satellite so finding it won’t be a problem and we can confirm details as you travel. We need to get you down there to secure her cargo. That’s your absolute top priority; we’ll let the Navy figure out what took her down.”

“Two questions sir,” responded McKinley. “Why us and why is the cargo sensitive?”

“Twenty seven thousand ton ships don’t just vanish with no time to send a mayday and, as far as we can tell, no survivors. Random attack? Accident?” The general spread his hands. “We don’t know. But something serious happened at about 02:00 GMT and we can’t ignore the possibility of a hostile action.”

McKinley looked at his watch. It was 04:18. No wonder the morning’s rush.

Sutton glanced behind McKinley to where there was a clock above the soundproof door. “Yes,” he continued, “time’s a factor. We need to get to the cargo before anyone else and we need to keep an ultra-tight lid on the situation. The ship was carrying four WE82 Trident warheads for a submarine that’s not supposed to exist. So it’s definitely not supposed to be in the Persian Gulf with armed missiles in range of the Iranians either. This is above top secret McKinley. Apart from the Joint Forces Command and a handful of admiralty at Faslane who are going mad right now, no-one knew about this, not even the captain of the Fort William. Why your lot? Yours is the only complete team I can deploy at the moment and, like I said, this needs to be completely secret. Not a whisper to the Saudis, the Bahrainis and never mind their neighbours across the gulf; no-one. The Navy are sending a destroyer but it’ll take nearly a day to get there and I can get you on site and working in less than nine hours.”

 Xander Richards. Coast: An Act of Burial (Kindle Locations 305-320).

 

 

I have a love-hate relationship with thrillers. I love when the action is intense, but I hate when the story telegraphs the suspense to the point that you see things coming. Finding a balance is not easy for all but the best authors. There is a certain finesse that usually takes time and practice to achieve, but when the author gets there, the books can be magnificent.

Book Review: Raw Vengeance

“Why did he do it?” Rich asked Rhonda, hoping she would see the implications.

“What? Go after the mayor? He’s pissed he got the axe, that’s why.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Rich said, trying to get his point across. “He posted a farewell message online and drove slow enough on the freeway for us to catch up. The Mustang could have done well over a hundred seventy-five, but he kept it at one hundred, and he wasn’t wearing any armor. Wes wanted this to happen. He wanted to kill the mayor, but this looks like a classic case of ‘death by cop.’ This was a message.”

She nodded without saying anything.

 

 

Sometimes anger results in immediate action. Sometimes it sits, and festers until it boils over.  Raw Vengeance, by Josh Handrich, is a novella that introduces us to Rich Fordham, and ambitious young reporter looking for his big break. The streets of Chicago have lost their appeal to him and he knows he has to get abroad if he’s going to make his name in the world, but he didn’t count on the spiral of anger that he would get caught in as he sought his big story. If he gets the story it could be the on that puts him on the world stage, but one wrong move and he goes from reporting the story to being the story.

 Raw Vengeance is a short read with a quick pace that follows Rich Fordham along with a collection of surrounding characters that feed the story itself. I liked the story as it is, but I would have loved it in a longer format so that I could have gotten more involved with the characters instead of getting only a quick feel for who they were. The author introduces a number of characters using well-known archetypes with a splash of color that he introduces to make them something a little different from the standard. If future books in the series are going to be succesful the characters will need more fleshing out, especially Rich, who is the nominal hero of the story.

The pace moves along at a decent page and keeps the reader guessing about exactly what is going on and what is going to happen, which makes the story an enjoyable page turner. However, there are some leaps that come out of left field and left me scratching my head. As nice as it is to be surprised when reading a thriller, it is much more enjoyable when the reader is able to look back and say, “ahhh, I wondered what all of that was about,” and this story falls a bit short in that sense. Raw vengeance has a wealth of surprises, but a dearth of suspense.

If you’re planning a lazy weekend of reading, then this is a great book to start with, and it is well worth the $0.99 e-book price on Amazon.com.

 

LINKS:

Josh Hadrich’s Home Page

Book Review: Pandora’s Grave

 He had felt the evil of the place from the moment they had arrived. Something palpable, something he could sense in the very air.

And now it had manifested itself in the body of the young man at his feet. Young man? Little more than a boy, really. One of the college students that had followed him to this godforsaken land, chasing the opportunity of a lifetime. Opportunity…

The Israeli straightened, rising to his feet, looking around at the few that were left. “He’s dead,” he announced flatly, stating the obvious.

“What–I mean, what happened?”

He looked up into the light green eyes of the young woman in front of him, eyes now filled with tears. She was on the verge of breaking. As were they all. Somehow he had to keep them together. Somehow…

“I have no idea, Rachel,” he replied, his voice little more than a whisper.

When I was younger I read little outside of fantasy and science fiction, but my mother turned me on to The Hunt For Red October by Tom Clancy and it ended up adding another genre to my repertoire of reading: the military espionage thriller.

Stephen England’s Pandora’s Grave is an excellent thriller in the same tradition of Clancy, with plenty of action, twists and turns and a glimpse into the world of espionage where trust is a commodity none can afford and lies are the currency of the trade.

When the members of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service are sent in to rescue a group of archaeologists who had discovered something that should have been lost to the annals of history, everything goes wrong and the only obvious answer is that there is a traitor in their midst. Finding a spy hidden amongst spies proves difficult, but when the world is heading towards war there isn’t enough time to play it safe.

Harry Nichols, the head of the National Clandestine Service’s Alpha Team is the main focus of the story, but the author weaves in all of the other characters with a deft touch that makes them all stand out as individuals and makes each of them believable. The characters compliment and reinforce the story itself which is embellished with technical details and action sequences that draw you into the book completely.

I would definitely recommend picking up a copy of this book in print or in electronic format.

Please visit the author’s website at http://www.stephenwrites.com/.

Buy in print HERE.

Or electronically through AMAZON or SMASHWORDS.