Not the best Hodge has to offer
342930
Very 90's piece of horror. Firmly set in the tropes of that age. Hodge is very good. This anthology has some bright spots but it's uneven at times. It has items pulled from other anthologies. The 5 star ratings posted here are more about the author and less about this example of his work.
3761435
Somehow seems to fall short of the mark.

As I've read the entire series I found this tale seemed at times to be, perhaps, foundering.

I recommend it with the caveat that it is not Mr. Preston's nor Mr. Child's best work, but that's just my personal opinion.
4211428
I was disappointed in this series after I read Deadly Scandal, and I had hopes. In my opinion, there was a lot of padding that added nothing to the story, the pace was slow (which is not necessarily bad) and the tone & language were out of place, too modern for the time period. I read it to the end, but guessed the murderer about three chapters before the characters did, which again does not bother me, I just failed to engage fully with the heroine, which IS important. If you are not as picky as I am, you'll probably enjoy this, it does have it's redeeming features.
3799887
I love Kerr's novels and Bernie Gunther is a great character, but this book was not one of the best. I was disappointed.
2299485
I have read a couple of the books in the series.  This novella is my least favorite. It's okay but I didn't much care for it.

Since I enjoy antiques, I am predisposed to  like the basic premise of this series:  a mother and daughter who got into the antiques business together and along the way solve the occasional murder.  Mom has mental problems and is on  meds long term; daughter is severely depressed  after a divorce and is on Prozac.  Their nagging each other about their meds is a recurring theme in the series, and pops up a lot in this novella.  More than is necessary to my way of thinking.

Like the spoiled little dog.  I'm glad her vision has been restored (is that possible?),  It is a nice touch. She is good for a grin.

One of the trademarks of this series is that Brandy, the daughter, writes most of the story, and her mother writes the rest.  They snipe back and forth at each other's versions of the story, and sometimes the editor/publisher chimes in to try to get them back on track.  I presume that since Barbara Allen is actually two people (a husband and wife) that this an obvious way to divide up the writing.  Sometimes the technique works okay; sometimes it is overdone.  In this particular story it is overdone and becomes distracting.  Brandy's version of the story is okay, but her mom's is so over the top it sounds like she's a flagrantly gay male rather than an elderly female.  The character's "voice" just doesn't sound right.

This a Christmas story.  The murder victim is the obnoxious star of a local history play which the mother wrote.  Of course, our heroines (with the able assistance of the little dog) have to help the sheriff solve the crime and all ends well.  There are a lot of Christmas stories being published right now as 'tis the season.  Some of them are entertaining, others are hacked together to take advantage of the seasonal market.  This one is reads hacked together hastily.  Big fans of the series will like it.  If you haven't read any of  the other books be warned that it doesn't stand alone very well.  You can follow the story, but the characters are so shallow here that they are hard to enjoy; you might want to skip this so you don't get turned off to the series.
2211084
I have to own that as a Lackey fan since "Arrows of the Queen" I was rather disappointed in "Take a Theif".  The book's central character Skif has peppered many of Lackey's earlier works of Valdemar with his presence and has become something of a favorite to her readers.  I felt he deserved better treatment than to be recast as Dicken's Oliver Twist.  It's all in there, poor orphaned boy in an abusive environment where he is little better than a slave moves on up the social ladder to become the theiving fingers for a Fagan like character named Bazie.  After that he climbs further up the social ladder to a place of wealth and comfort where he will mingle with the social elite of Valdemar's nobility and even royalty.
  Not only is the plot very Dickensian, but the setting is much like a grimy recasting of Victorian London.  The characters populating the city of Haven even speak in a terrible cockney cant reminiscent of England's lower class.  Anyone who has read Dickens will also recognise a tiresome over attention to the most minute details.  Dickens could drone on for pages about the description of a single chair and one finds depressing echos of that writing style evident in this novel.
  I also feel the need to speculate why at this late a date, Ms. Lackey chose to make the character Alberich, also known from her earlier works, speak in Yoda like broken english.  Just a little further down the timeline of Valdemar, Alberich has a much better grasp of the language and it's hard to reconcile the difference in speech with so short a lapse of Valdemaran time.
  All that said, the story was still enjoyable to a degree and despite it's rather slow moving action it is an easy read.  Not a total loss, but also not what this Lackey fan has come to expect from her favorite author.
2575635
Having read all of Ms Hodge's books obviously I am a fan but I did not like the protagonist of this book. I found her too weak and insubstantial. I am a psychologist and have worked as CEO at three different psychiatric hospitals as well as in a variety of other  capacities. I have attended a number of drug rep. conferences. I have also seen psychiatric illness up close and it is not pretty. I am not knowledgeable about drug companies, however, I follow the news and I am aware of the current controversies re. all types of vaccines and a number of drugs. We all know about TV advertising of drugs right around dinner time. As much as good hygiene habits and hand washing, etc., is given credit for the almost non-existence of childhood diseases, I believe that immunizations have played a major part also. The average age of longevity around the turn of the twentieth century was approximately forty-five. It is now in the upper seventies. Modern medicine and medications have played a big part in this. We should also thank our doctors for the vigilance they pay to the outcome of the medications they prescribe to their patients. I am not saying we should not be critical of bad practices we see but not to throw out the baby with the bath water. Too many people are too critical of science but without it we would be nowhere.
567551
i'm a big fan of the genre - however, i don't see much of a plot on any dimension as of 2 episodes.  Battles, scenery, history make it 'passable' but there is nothing forming as a story.  Hodgepodge characters
473894
I prefer my heroines in a book to be smart, intuitive women, not weak, assuming chits. This book was not as good as the Brides of Beckham series, mainly because this (the third) and its predecessors have very weak, insupportable plots. The lead females seem whiny and thick to me, mistrusting rather than using their common sense to suss out the love they're getting but instead mistrusting it because the story needs a plotline.
In this book there were too many red herrings. Although I will say that I liked Amaryllis and Alex's pre-emptive marital relations! This was the most steamy I've seen this author go, and I was proud of her. She went there (a little) and gave us a desperate lover and his soul mate acting the way real people might have acted. For that, I chose three stars instead of two.
4064861
I love baseball. I love the often heart wrenching drama of minor league ball. I once owned season tickets to a low A team. I love stories about old school towns that are facing reinvention or death.
In short, I like all the different parts of this story and was really expecting it to be something great.
Sadly, the book never actually becomes greater than the sum or its parts or even as great as those parts. It has potential, to be great. And to be fair, it's hard for me to explain my "meh" response to the book. The author just never drew me in. He has some real moments where he really shines.
In one section he talks about the different types of fans that exist on the sports frontier. This section is excellent. Unfortunately, those sections of excellence have wide swaths of mediocre to poor pros between them.
If you are a hardcore baseball fan, you may enjoy this book. If you have some experience with the dying town or minor league ball, you may enjoy this book.
It's not really bad, it's just far from great.
1583450
Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party by Lynn Vincent and Robert Stacy McCain was a bit of a disappointment.  The cover and introduction promise stories of crime and misdoings throughout the entire history of the Democrat Party, but much of the book focuses on the last 25 years or so.  Scandals involving Roosevelt and other older Dems are glossed over without detail.  The writers seem to assume that the reader is already familiar with those events.  Much focus is placed on the shenanigans of the Clinton White House, which almost seems to be an issue done to death.  Vincent and McCain do bring up several Republican wrong-doers to be fair.  I think the writers' strongest point is that while Republicans seem to face up to their crimes or at least have to pay the penalty, Democrats very often do not and are occasionally rewarded for them.  This point alone is worth reading the book for.
3213840
For my money, this isn't one of the better Mike Shayne mysteries.  For one thing, despite the bloody corpses, there's not a whole lot of action.  Moreover, this is one of those convoluted plots involving a whole bunch of connected suspects but the twists and turns are simply not interesting.  And, the whole idea that every case has to involve Shayne withholding information from Chief Gentry for no special reason is a tired plot device.  You get a scandal reporter, threatening letters, gambling syndicates, and unhappy couples, but that's about all you get.
3937891
This one is pretty low-ranking for me among the Alleyn mysteries. The stakes are very unclear, the characters are not particularly gripping, and the romance is very limp. Even the grand old Shakespearean character, the kind of character who Marsh usually has a lot of fun with, is rather hackneyed and irritating. Because the narration is not focused through Alleyn, it's not as sharp a story as it usually is. I'd say this is one for the faithful fans, but for a more casual reader, I wouldn't recommend it.
2040911
The Inspector Rutledge series from Charles Todd are 3-star and 4-star works:  none rises to the level of greatness, none descend to 2-star level.  They are decent reads.  Pale Horse rates 3 stars:  decent, but not memorable, worth keeping rather than donating to your local library.  There's no groundbreaking here, nothing we haven't seen in the other Rutledge mysteries. There's an unidentified corpse, some less than professional police work (not by Rutledge), time spent in village pubs by Rutledge speaking to local residents.

There are some things which don't feel quite right.  Rutledge spends a great deal of time driving back and forth between London, Yorkshire, Berkshire, and Wales,  often late at night.  Most other series involving Yard inspectors seem to emphasize travel by train.  Yorkshire is 200-plus miles from London, and in 1920 there were no motorways.  I would think that few petrol stations would be open late at night.  Finding your way around at night would not be that easy, and 6-volt headlights (unlike the current 12-volt systems) did not allow a good rate of speed.  Motorcar breakdowns were much more common:  cars were not designed for sustained long-distance travel. I often found myself thinking about all this driving rather than the mystery at hand.

The story itself seems rather slow at times, and the denouement seems somewhat anticlimactical as well as centering on some improbable coincidences, and there were some large potholes in the story road, so to speak, that were left unfilled-in.  If you haven't read Todd's stories, try some of the other works first.  For alternative period pieces--mysteries set just after WW I, try also Winspear's books, and in particular, Airth's fine River of Darkness.
4021101
This is Rice's strongest book so far, but the plot is too convoluted, which results in the book running too long by about eighty pages. Some of the characters could have been developed better(I found myself going back pages in order to better recall certain characters). And there are just a few plot contrivances too many for my taste - leave that to Charles Dickens. This is beach-reading material, not a must-read book.
2664841
This book differs from Perry's other novels in that two major elements of the series, Charlotte's relatives and Pitt's investigations which crisscross London at different social levels, are downplayed, though not totally absent. Instead the focus is on the residence of one scholarly clergyman and the death of his assistant. Since the suspects are limited and the household highly dysfunctional, the plot comes off as group therapy in the guise of a murder investigation. While the insights provided by the swinging outbursts and accusations is well done, I find it less interesting than the pictures of London provided in her other books.
1177913
There are some great lessons about the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the book, however, the story is not terribly engaging.  The book is unnecessarily wordy and, as a result, moves along rather sluggishly. But, it is short, so it's bearable to finish the entire book.  You might want to buy it used, or try the library - I can't imagine ever going back and reading it again.