David Warren's writting skills are nothing to "jest" about.
594366
I received this book on 6/10/16 and finished it on 6/13/16.  I could not put the book down.  I will absolutely be buying more of David Warren's material.
327329
Loving Day starts out promisingly but quickly devolves into an overwrought melodrama that is as unaffecting as it is clunkily written. Warren Duffy is the proverbial prodigal son who returns to his childhood home in Germantown, Philadelphia, to do right by his inheritance. At the same time that he debates what to do about the mansion-like but "crackhead"-infested house his father left him, Warren discovers that a daughter he had fathered with a long-ago (but now deceased) girlfriend is in need of his parental support. So goes the intergenerational dynamic that lies at the heart of this novel.

I actively disliked reading Loving Day because its tone is just all over the place, as though Mat Johnson, the author, had lost control of the narrative voice he wished to convey and left it at that. Warren is a thoroughly unlikeable character, and while I understand that alone doesn't disqualify the novel's success, I find his blinkered unselfconsciousness to be at odds with the book's message. There's little to no reason to care about Warren's rocky love life or his paternal inheritance (in both senses of the term) because his character barely rises above the level of an embittered manchild. So when the story itself tries to get us to care about his falling in love with another character or trying to relate to his daughter, I find Warren's first-person voice to be grating, unreflective, and just unrelatable.

A similar tonal mismatch led me to reject the novel's eagerness to depict mixed-race/biracial issues in contemporary America. Warren is fair-skinned but self-identifies as African American. The bulk of the narrative concerns his working for/against a Philadelphia charter school called Melange, which seeks to help students come to terms with their mixed-race identities. This all sounds good in the abstract, but Warren is justly suspicious of Melange's intentions from the outset: after all, there is a kind of narcissism embedded in the school's belief that it transcends the "white/black" binary of conventional U.S. race relations. Paul Beatty made fun of this kind of kumbaya "Eracism" in his 1996 novel The White Boy Shuffle. The thing is, although Warren gives voice to such critique, the story itself actually wants us to believe in the promise of Melange's mission -- even going so far as to include a scene where two ghosts, a black man and a white woman (called the "First Couple"), mate in front of Warren's daughter and become Melange's unofficial mascots. This is no joke: Johnson really invests in the power of this image, even if Warren isn't a believer until the very end. I, however, wasn't impressed. The device is cheap, and it stands in for the novel's surprisingly mushy/PC-driven racial politics.

I've enjoyed reading Johnson's other works on mixed-race/biracial identity, particularly his 2008 graphic novel Incognegro. Loving Day is a sad fall from the heights of that wonderful book.
3380071
The Da'Vinci Code was readable, all other Dan Brown books are tedious, predictable and monotonous. I hope he writes no more.
720587
I'm not looking for a fiction fast-paced novel with accounting textbooks. But, I've read enough of them to realize when one is written better than another. This doesn't make the cut. All the critical information is in there, it's all factually consistent and written technically well. But it's a pedantic read. There's very little natural language used and there's no effort to relate to the reader for an easier comprehension experience.
2321878
Presents nothing new about the assassination or Oswald.  Just another rehash of worn out grassy conspiracy theories. James Duffy is not even a good Oliver Stone wannabe
270013
Seemed as though the author's desire to write a book superseded his desire to convey an idea. The book was fine but not anything special.
2443021
I don't give a lot of 1 star reviews, but Conspiracies deserves no more than this. There are so many poorly argued arguments here, I'll mention just a few:
1. He was a top economic adviser to Reagan and Bush and still has the nerve to complain that the "ruling class" has been financially irresponsible. Debt went up far more under these two than under Clinton and Carter.
2. He criticizes liberal administrations for not doing enough to remedy income inequality. While that position is reasonable, it's a little hard to take this critique seriously, being that he's from the  ideological camp that says it isn't that important in the first place. His outrage comes off as insincere (a harsher reviewer might say hypocritical).
3. The capriciousness of federal bureaucrats, defying the popular will,  seems to upset him. His outrage on this subject is more than a little selective. Perhaps he thinks none of us remember his previous employers, the Reagan and Bush administrations. The Reagan administration routinely encouraged bureaucrats' constantly defying the will of the legislature. The Department of Labor was once ordered by a federal judge to obey a law it considered too costly to enforce. The EPA chief was reprimanded by Congress for not enforcing environmental laws that it did not pass the administration's (self-imposed) cost-benefit test. The will of the people didn't seem to matter much back then.
4. His arguments on gun control were laughable; he actually quotes the NRA as a source on how many crimes are deterred by firearm use.
5. Selective outrage on presidential executive actions. Obama's a tyrant/dictator  for using executive orders; Reagan and the Bushes not so much. It wasn't that Obama used it more often See this comparison [...] So I am forced to conclude that Lindsey really doesn't object to presidential rule making, only to Democratic president rule making.
Nothing of value here.
2546771
It was OK, nothing special.  I'd liken it to flipping channels when you can't find anything else on so you settle in and watch it, or read it, in this case.
769753
This was free and I wouldn't recommend paying much for it. Interesting, not engrossing.
963645
If you know how to ask open-ended questions in a friendly manner, or friendly-sounding manner, you don't need this book.
212322
After finishing this book, I looked up more information on the author, fully expecting to find that this was his debut novel. I was very surprised to find that he's written quite a few other books. For the most part, No Show reads like it was written by an amateur. Dialogue is either overly formal or overly casual and rarely rings true. The final showdown scene has absolutely no suspense, no shock, no intrigue. The entire plot is thin. There are strange details given about almost every character that honestly seem like shallow attempts at completing some arbitrary "character development" checkbox. Part of making a thriller great is the writing, and the writing in this is just laughable in comparison to just about any other author out there.

I thought about giving it two stars instead of one because the mystery of what happened to the main character's wife did keep me turning pages for a while, but even that fell flat - once I got about halfway through the book, I stopped caring whether he ever found her.

It is extremely rare for me to give a thriller less than 3 stars, because I am a sucker for even mediocre thrillers. But this one doesn't even make it to mediocrity. Overall, I was very disappointed.
3584929
The Secret Scroll by Ronald Cutler is the story of an American archaeologist named Josh Cohen who visits the holy land and driven by visions finds a scroll hidden in a cave that was written by Jesus Christ.  The discovery unleashes the fury of an ancient murderous cult who seek to kill all non-christians and hopes to suppress the scroll's message before it can get out. Josh becomes caught in this web of murder, mystery and love.

As novels go, "The Secret Scroll" is nothing special. As a freshman effort by the author, it's certainly better than what some folks would come up with on their first attempt, and it shows the mark of someone who did his research before writing it.

Still, Cutler goes down story avenues cut by other authors long before him. The secret society conspiracy thing was done in "The Davinci Code." The whole, secret letter from ancient times that threatens to upset world faiths thing was done years ago in the bestselling "A Skeleton in God's Closet." Both are better books than this.

Cutler takes these concepts, combined with new age philosophy, the belief in reincarnation and gnostic thought and weaves them into a story that suggests that Jesus Christ was simply an above normal fellow with ESP and telekinesis and that God is a new age-like "Divine spark in each of us."

Added to that is an implausible conspiracy led by a silly comic book style villain, combined with "Use the Force Luke" superpowers, a ridiculous "love at first sight" romance story, convoluted plot twists and slightly ludicrous action scenes. Moreover, the mystery of the identity of the bad guy was over the top and fairly transparent from the getgo.

Of course, what makes the whole thing even more silly is the new age post-modern tone of the "Jesus scroll," that just perfectly says all the right things to make Jesus an ancient post-modern New Age superstar. Of course, the superpowers Josh himself displays, his conversations with his reincarnated past selves (of which Jesus is apparently one) and his healing with a touch don't help either.

It might only barely have worked if written by a more skillful author, but Cutler's writing is mediocre at best. It's technically clean but suffers from a choppy style and needlessly convoluted plot progression. There are so many twists and turns and melodramatic cliffhangers in this novel that add little to the story that one ends up rolling one's eyes by the end of it.

Writing style can be forgiven, but Cutler had a clear agenda in this novel and his mediocre writing kept him from being very subtle about it.

He clearly takes issue with organized religion, and with Christianity specifically, banging on the misdeeds of past Christians time and time again. Never mind that most of modern Christianity has repented of those awful misdeeds.

In a story that takes place in the Holy Land where a certain religious extremism that embraces the concept of killing whole busloads of people in the name of a god is a real issue, he concocts Christian extremists to do the killing instead. In the real world, its actually significant segments of other faiths that have enthusiastically and unapologetically taken up the banner of "killing for god" these days.  Non-Christian faiths.

As a side note, I found it interesting that all of the Christian characters (and the couple Arab ones) in the book meet really bad ends, though to his credit, the true Christian ones show remarkable strength of faith. Still, the only survivors were Jewish.

Overall, I cannot suggest this novel. Putting my own personal faith bias aside, The Secret Scroll is just not that good of a book. Its writing is entry level at best and the story-line is a mish-mashed rip off of other books written years before this one. Certainly there are better novels in this genre of literature to look for first. It's a nice effort by a freshman writer, but I really found it quite bad.
1954473
Like all his books, it's well written, but unless you are a die-hard Portland Trailblazer fan that wants all the inside info from distant 35 years ago, there's nothing of particular exciting interest in this story.  There are no surprises or revelations.  I found it a "slightly interesting stroll in a park."
4299970
Another Sean Dillon book from a weakened Jack Higgins. It's obvious now that a classic author has fallen into a series writer like Gerard De Villiers. This book can be granted only of a very fast pace and of movie  flow plot. And that's it. No characters' deepening, no complete scenery  narrations (in the shake of galloping pace), not complete plot strings of a  detective or spy story complex, neither a copy of a Ludlum/Follet/Clancy  style of brainiac plot. Action is also poor, at very few points and not  intense, neither interesting in its resolution. The Sean Dillon superheroe  motto is all around the book again and it reminds to someone the decades of  videos that the heroe gets out of it with neither a scratch. Not to forget  to mention that the side characters are accrued with characteristics or  adjectives without a logical explanation, neither proving it, so they end  as stupid as a vase flower, just ornamental. The plot itself is simplistic,  with a minimalistic element of surprise (as to the Judas' alter ego), but  those readers of detective stories background will start guessing somewhere  at the middle. Continuous action spot changes present the movie characterto  the plot, presenting cosmopolitan type elements of a 007 story, alas it's  not a witty Ian Fleming here, but an aging Higgins who thinks that by  writting many books a year will keep him at a writers' elite. Perhaps its  even his publisher's fault. Whatever the reason the poor reader, will have  a medium to fair time spending, but nothing more. Shame.
2655944
Blah writing but I guess for a couple bucks it's okay to read if you're bored.
380748
While the author had some good ideas for their fantasy world and for what could happen to their cast of characters, they lacked the skill (or inclination) to really develop either of these things.

Characters are not developed and no backstory is given for the world. There's no point at which the reader is given a framework or a setting in which to place events. Facts are given out as needed to advance the plot, and not until needed, which makes the story feel flat. There's no nuance, no character development, no particular reason why we should care about either the characters or their adventures.

The writing itself is adequate (not really good) and the editing acceptable with just a few uncorrected errors, but this is not "epic fantasy" because it's not "epic." All of the action takes place over the course of a couple of days, not enough time to form a connection with any of the characters, given the lack of any supporting details. The story is very linear--moves from A to Z as quickly as possible--which makes it boring.

It's an okay story for a 10 year-old, although I personally think the $2.99 price is too high for 100 pages of text.
4862282
Standard plot, not intrigue.  If you read any of the Noah Wolfe books this is pretty standard with no surprises