Speed-Reading Book Nerd Reviews

Murder By Other Means

By John Scalzi.

Previous book here.

I find it hard to review a book that I had to listen to only--in this case, had to listen to twice to be able to write it--but since nobody else seems to have a review of the book online (I guess for that reason), I'll give it a shot.

It's a couple of years since the last book, and due to budget cuts (and losing the consulting with the cops gig Tony had in the last book), Tony's doing the occasional gray area job, like shooting a businessman who wants to get back to China ASAP. Tony goes for it and then when he goes to deposit some of his pay in the bank, a bank robbery happens. Of course the robbers can escape in this world by shooting each other, but when one of them stays dead--those 1 in 1000 deaths--that throws things off. Even worse, the guy who died turns out to be a dispatcher Tony knows and recently talked to, even if Tony turned down the "choke club" job. He still has some standards.

Anyway, Tony suspects--reasonably--that a bank employee who also got shot during the job was involved in it and kind of snoops around for his old sorta-buddy cop Langdon. He thinks that's the end of it, until Langdon's new nosy partner Bradley kills himself--or well, "kills himself," which kicks off a number of other suicides, or "suicides" because it seems unlikely that all of them would have made that choice. Bradley was investigating Tony since Tony has enough awkward coincidences going on with the case. Langdon thinks Tony needs protection, and she's not wrong, since it seems pretty logical to just about everyone else that Tony could very well be involved since he knows a lot of the people involved.  

This one continues to delve into the implications of this world, which I appreciate, such as "how do you murder someone without technically murdering someone?" (see title) and "how do you threaten someone when death is only sorta on the table?" Even though Tony says he's a dispatcher because he never had any other skills, he's a sharp detective. There is a lot of strong coincidence in this one that makes Tony look guilty, but I did appreciate how all the pieces came together, and even stuff like the opening scenes and Tony's living arrangements turn out to all fit into a puzzle I wasn't expecting. Pretty cool. 

If anything isn't super great in this, it's my kind of realizing that Tony....I dunno, needs some more inner life in some respects, perhaps? Hobbies? Something to him beyond just being a dispatcher/detective? He seems incredibly distant from everyone. He doesn't seem to have family or anything other than books and takeout. He has people he is "friendly" with but isn't friends with, and says this of about everyone. Does he have anyone he'd consider a friend? He doesn't really seem to have connections with anyone or attachments to anything. At one point Tony's apartment is burned down, and having had a friend lose his home in the fires recently so I'm at least a little aware of what shit he's going through, I kind of felt like this just....didn't affect Tony all that much? He's very drifter-y, I'd like to see Tony have some more to him than just the case. I can say that by the end of the book he's actually acknowledging that he's friends with Langdon, so there's that.... 

Zachary Quinto continues to do a great job of narrating and sketching out the various voices in this one. I really like him as a narrator. 

Anyway, I look forward to book three  Four stars. 

The Relentless Moon

By Mary Robinette Kowal.

This is the interquel to The Fated Sky, taking place on Earth/the Moon while Elna is off on Mars. Our narrator this time is Nicole Wargin: former ballerina, pilot, astronaut, and wife of the Kansas governor. She's 50 years old and getting annoyed that she's considered "old hat" these days socially, but is still involved in periodically working on the Moon colony.

And then just TONS AND TONS OF SABOTAGE starts happening everywhere around her. There's bombings, there's poisonings, there's sabotage, which feels like it's happening every other day. Nicole has high security clearance, so she's "read in" on how the Earth First organization, which is (a) rightly pissed at the fact that not everybody is going to be allowed to leave the planet, (b) also pissed that money is going to space and not to trying to improve things on earth, has now (c) decided to go terrorist and try to destroy the space program.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEK.

So Nicole, a lady of special skills from Swiss boarding school and being EXTREMELY knowledgeable about codes, and social manipulation and engineering after being a politician's wife for so long, is told to be the secretary to the guy running the moon (note: she doesn't type) so she can investigate the situation. Just getting to the moon is dangerous under these circumstances, and Nicole finds herself investigating while having her dominant arm broken, having her anorexia triggered out the wazoo, all kinds of things going wrong, and strange blackouts happening every sixteen minutes. She's got amazing backup in having Eugene, Myrtle, and Helen on her side to help, and those characters really shine in this book. Like "Go Eugene!" in particular. But it's a very tense spy/mystery thriller sort of book this time rather than about the coolness of going to space, though sexism is still, as ever, a thing. 

Nicole is awesome. I love how she calculates all social stuff in her head, she strategizes, she works a plan. Though even as life gets more and more stressful, she's more and more affected even as she plugs on. 

I'll say this as someone reading during the pandemic and having a hard time again: I spent the day reading it pretty compulsively, but emotionally it was somewhat hard going at times. A Big Hard Thing does happen about two thirds of the way through the book that is sad-making. And well, since the polio vaccine didn't go so well in this universe, there's a polio outbreak on the moon somehow, but I will say that it's not fatal. 

I would like to say that I found page 90-91 to be delightful, as Nicole finds out about Nathaniel and Elma's secret messaging system. 

• 'I hope you don't think I am so delicate as to be shocked or offended by innuendo involving rockets, thrusters, or orbital insertions."
• "Men can be such delicate wilting flowers."
• "Honestly, their rocketry innuendo was embarrassing. They were married. Just say "dick" and "masturbate" like an adult. Poor innocent dears." 
• "I remember when I showed Elma my vibrator on the Moon and I thought she'd melt her spacesuit with the heat of her embarrassment. She's adorable."

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH LOVE IT. I know I watched an interview with the author where she said that making space dick jokes is definitely a thing astronauts do.... 

This author is great at portraying loving relationships and happy marriages, and this continues with Nicole and her husband Kenneth, who may have differences of opinion but they are still close, even when on different planets. "Our marriage was strained and compromised in every direction, but the one thing i knew with absolute certainty was that Kenneth had my back." For various reasons it's not as happy/idyllic as other people, but it's still good, and hits the heart. 

I'm going to do some spoiler talk below the spoiler cut.

Anyway, I'm going to give it 4.5 stars. This is very good to read, albeit kind of emotionally hard going at times, but maybe that's just also the times I'm reading it in. Excellent job. 

Deadly Little Scandals

By Jennifer Lynn Barnes.

Previous book here.

It's summer! Time to go hang out by the lake, join a secret society of ladies called the White Gloves, come across a dead body while doing that, and investigate one missing mom and baby. 

"That's just how things work around here. Fancy shindig, scandalous happenings, murmur murmur, and voila." -Boone on how parties help solve issues. 

That's about the plot. Sawyer's still kind of quietly reeling from the revelations of the last book, while eventually creep out in this one. Olivia and JD's marriage is going terribly, Lily's not sure what she wants, Sawyer is slowly edging towards attempting a romantic flirtation with Nick, and Greer's now eight months fake pregnant. Let's see how THAT goes.

But seriously, the girls both investigate the missing third girl while being rushed to join a secret society called the White Gloves who do daredevil activities. Their leader is Victoria Gutierrez, a relative of the missing girl and a shrewd chick in her own right, I like her. Meanwhile, Lily's quietly cruising towards a nervous breakdown and Sawyer is slowly edging into a relationship with Nick, even as she's all "I never want to fall in love."

And then there are CRAZY CRAZY FAMILY REVELATIONS AHOY, Y'ALL. Like DAAAAAAAAAAAAMN the ending DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMN that's crazy much. I'll take that below the spoiler cut.

What do I like? Sawyer's growing. There wasn't much in the way of romance in the last book, but her edging towards one with Nick even as she's kind of freaked is sweet. You feel for Lily as her world is slowly shattering around her, and then it gets even worse. I liked the White Gloves's overall mission, even though it doesn't get much play and mostly they just come off as a daredevil girl group combined with Rose and Grave or something. ("You're here because you know what it's like to be powerless....Because when people say that well-behaved women rarely make history, they leave out the little tidbit that the women who do make history rarely do so alone.") I liked the use of their secrets and the dares that came afterwards to change up the girls's set mentalities. I like Victoria, who's as into the mystery investigation as Sawyer and seems like a cool slightly older mentor. I don't think I got much more of Nick's personality in this, but at least I got more of why she's into him--there's something about him that makes her want to reveal all her secrets (been there, girl), and he's ready for a relationship when she's not (yet). 

What's a bit off? The "oops, I wasn't actually pregnant" revelation that the book seems to be cruising toward is completely glossed over and you're like, whaaaaaat?!?!The White Gloves aspect of the book kind of fades out after awhile and given the promise of them, that disappointed me. But mostly, the ending is just crazy crazy crazy Southern gothic nuttery, and make of that what you will. The mind boggles. It's not out of nowhere nuttery, per se, but after awhile you are just like GOOD GOD, WHOSE KID IS WHOSE HERE? 

"Just remember, what we're about to tell you doesn't change who you are. It's just like musical chairs, but with parents." -Sadie-Grace

So, to the spoiler cut we shall go for that one. Overall, I give it three and a half stars. Well done, set up well, but craycray.

Little White Lies

By Jennifer Lynn Barnes.

"Every Southern lady should know how to drug and frame a scoundrel surely in need of drugging and framing."

Sawyer Taft's mom Ellie used to be a debutante, until she got pregnant and kicked out at age seventeen. Since then, life's been iffy and shifty and involved living above a bar, and Sawyer sounds like she's had to be the responsible one in the relationship. So when her long lost grandmother Lillian shows up offering her five hundred thousand dollars to live with her for nine months and become a debutante as well (and note that her mother's run off again), Sawyer takes her up on it. Not just for the college money, mind you, but to see if she can figure out who her father is. 

Sawyer quickly finds friends, as she hits it off with her cousin Lily and her beautiful-but-anxious friend Sadie-Grace. And then there's Campbell, the sister of lily's ex Walker, who has figured out Lily's secret blogging project and uses it to blackmail everyone else into helping her do...what, exactly? Sawyer isn't afraid of Campbell, but she's intrigued by a mystery, and not just the one about her parentage either.

What's good about this one? This author does badass teen ladies well and Sawyer is no exception. She's smart and tough and knows where to push back and where not to, she's strategic, and she's even protective. Lily and Sadie-Grace are sweet (Sadie-Grace starts doing ballet when she's nervous, which is cute). Campbell starts out as the villain, but has hidden depths that made me quite fond of her. She's conniving, but for a good reason, as it turns out, and Sawyer is delighted to join in the scheme. And Lillian the grandmother is a quiet badass. As for the boys in this world, I'm fond enough of Walker, but got a kick out of Boone, the snarkiest one in the book and I wish he got a bit more play.

What's not so great? Nick, the vague love interest of Sawyer, doesn't get a whole lot of characterization despite his somewhat importance to the plot, and if you're into romance, there really isn't any here. Sawyer's mom Ellie is perennially confusing and lies and I never know what to make of her and her life choices and clearly Sawyer doesn't either. And while the "who's my daddy?" plot goes well and intriguing at first, there's a final twist thrown in that I frankly did not like. I will rant about that in the spoiler space, though. 

I also didn't really like the framing/flashbacks/flashforwards setup of this book, in which some total newbie cop is forced to deal with the debutantes at the jail and we get tiny excerpts of his confusion that are breadcrumbs for the reader as to who is who and what they are talking about. It was just kind of interrupty and annoying after awhile and I'm not sure it added anything to the book, which could have been told straightforwardly without missing a thing. I also continued to roll my eyes at the one character that everyone finds out is faking her pregnancy--very bad soap plot there. 

Overall, I give it three and a half stars. To the spoiler space we go....

Tuesday Mooney Talks To Ghosts

By Kate Racculia.

This is like the modern day equivalent of The Westing Game, y'all. I deeply enjoyed it.

Our title character is a researcher of rich donors for a hospital who mostly keeps to herself ever since her best friend Abby disappeared/died when they were sixteen. Her one friend is Dex, the best gay best friend ever, who was by far my favorite character and I'll rave about him more later. Dex and Tuesday attend a fancy gala dinner, where Dex quickly befriends a lady named Lila Korrapati Pryce...and then everyone sees her husband Vincent drop dead in front of everyone. But after his death, Vincent has engineered a scavenger hunt/mystery game for his fortune, and Tuesday and Dex both befriend the widow and her gay best friend Bert, and join in. Also joining in is Dorry, Tuesday's teenage neighbor pal, and Archie, the rich son of a disappeared rich father who's got a boatload of family issues of his own. 

What's great about this?

• Vincent Pryce is one of the best posthumous characters ever and you really wish you could have met him. He's a theatrical delight. Fun game, too. 
• The use of karaoke is sparing, but fitting and good.
• Lila, a.k.a. Lyle, is mysterious but interesting.
• Bert, who quickly becomes Dex's love interest, has a cute chemistry with him. 
• Archie.... I won't get into it because of spoiling, but wow, I liked the twists that went on with his character. Good job. 
• Tuesday talks to one ghost....specifically she's haunted by Abby after she used a Ouija board to try to talk to her. After ghost talking had consequences as a kid, Tuesday's cut off the voice, but Abby comes roaring back. She's also a great posthumous character and her dialogue is a delight. 
• Tuesday herself is all right, if a bit of a quiet cipher by comparison to everyone else. I do, however, wish I could do her job, which sounds right up my alley. How the hell do I get hired to do research for a living? 
• And I love, love Dex. I am not a gay male banker, but I feel like to some degree I live his life. Dex was a theater kid who gave it up for money, and is now hating his life. I hear ya, sir.

What's not so great?

• Dorry has a protective dad who quickly sidelines her from hanging out with Tuesday. This is very plausible in adultland, but at the same time kinda sucked for fiction reading since it detached her to some degree from the action and she had to go in on the side, as it were. 
• The romances are kind of barely started. Like at one point it's mentioned that two people slept together and you're all, "Wait, WHAT? When did this happen?" The chemistry is sold between Dex and Bert and Tuesday and Archie, but I could have used some more of this. I kind of felt like after a certain revelation, Bert dropped out of this more than I'd like.
• I also would have liked a little more Lila. She's cool.

Also, this book is hella quotable. 

• "Archie's father had disappeared. Archie knew how it felt for someone in his life to up and vanish. It didn't make her trust him any more, but it explained what she saw in him." 
• "I've started this email several times. Every time it gets weirder. At first it was like, "Dear Sir, I would cordially invite you to my home in Beacon Hill for brunch." Then it turned into "Dear Person I Barely Know, You tried to resuscitate my husband, and even though that didn't work out, I'd still like to get you drunk by eleven a.m. I am having trouble calibrating my gallows humor." -See, this is why I like Lila. 
• "Singing like a giant, showboating, asshole chameleon--an undeniably talented one, but still--was one of the only ways he could remind himself of well, who he was, and what he loved. He sang like an attention-seeking missile and remembered everything that weeks and months and years of pretending to care about money and how to sell it to other people had conspired to make him forget. Whenever he wrapped his fingers around the mic and opened his mouth, he, Poindexter Howard, was back."
• "And Dex thought, It's you. At last. And there was no worry or rush or panic or any of the things he usually felt when he met someone he was going to fall in love with. Only a warm opening in his chest that could have been happiness." 
• "I would rather eat falafel than get married." Another reason why I love Lila. And then the story leads to her finding true love with Vince in a karaoke bar. And he had Singing Poe-a-gram sent to her after his death, singing the song she heard him sing that night. Awwwwwww.
• "Vince was a lunatic in all the best ways. He's not done with life, despite being dead. He's not done with me or you or you, or anyone who takes him seriously enough to play this game.... I'm just saying if you want to win, even if you just want to play, think like a lunatic. A theatrical lunatic." --Lila again.
• "Implacable, unflappable Tuesday--his favorite emotional iceberg was on fucking fire."
• "It seems that being intensely frustrated was the most fun Archie'd had in months." 
• "Then Bert wrote back. And Dex had to fight the urge to squeal. This behavior was unusual and troubling." 
• "Dex didn't believe in coincidences. Wait. That wasn't true at all. Dex believed in coincidences, and fate, and signs and wonders, and all the great interlocking gears of the universe telling him to do things, and though he'd gotten pretty good at ignoring what the universe was telling him to do (most recently: quit your soul-sucking job and open a karaoke bar!), it didn't mean he couldn't still hear it screaming."
• "She almost said: That's what I recognized the first time I saw you. Not your brother but your father. Your father, and the weight of his absence. I know. I know how it feels to be haunted. But she didn't. She left him not long after. She didn't kiss him. She wanted to, but she also wanted to prolong the inevitable, stretch that feeling between them like warm taffy, because that game was its own kind of satisfaction."
• "He did not want to make a living like this. But he didn't know how else to live."
• "He wanted all these other parts of him to be seen, to live beyond this narrow life." 
• "I've had some odd things happen to me over the course of my life. I've learned to embrace the mysterious. Because the strange, the extraordinary--those experiences that make you look at the world like you've never seen it before, really pay attention to it--the strange changes you. Shows you new things about yourself. About life. Other people." -Bert, this is how I feel about that stuff happening to me too. I like him. 
• Dex in costume: "This Dex, painted for the gods (or at least the Madonnas), was a dead-serious joke, the ghost of who he thought, once upon a time, he was supposed to be. A singer. An actor. A light on a stage who could share infinite other lives for a moment with strangers, easing the sting of being so very finite indeed. This Dex was a reminder that he had lived long enough to have known other versions of himself, that the self he was now wasn't permanent, or didn't have to be; this Dex was many, and could become someone else still."
• "He was never more in danger than when he allowed himself to be most himself. When he was most himself, he ran the constant risk of being entirely Too Much." I hear ya, Dex.
• "And what he was meant to be was an artist, and what he was meant to do was to sing, and to move in the spaces surrounding the definite, between the sacred and the profane, the body and the spirit, the silent and the spoken, the living and the dead....The practice of this art was the transmutation of love." 
• "Don't cheat your friendships. Don't ask them to mean less to you than you do, or think they only have value if they're a stop on the way to a real relationship." -Tuesday
• "....that Tuesday could almost pretend they'd met like ordinary people, and that whatever they were to each other, now or in the future, could be easy. Then another part of her said, You never wanted ordinary or easy, and you know it."

This book is poetic and inspirational and deep and wow. Four and a half stars. Near epic.

The Hound of Justice

By Claire O'Dell.

Previous book here.

This book is kind of a slow starter, mostly focusing on Janet's getting back into the swing of working as a doctor again with her new arm, which she dubs "Lazarus." Eventually we get into a plot with Sara, who's still after their mutual enemy and once she gets back in better graces at her job, goes into the New Confederacy to work on that. Then Janet's asked to join her down there because they need a surgeon, which is more interesting to read about. I liked the ladies they were hanging out with in the Resistance. Janet gets a love interest and she and Sara still don't really ah, do anything. The love interest is nice enough but feels temporary since she suspects Janet is up to something but Janet can't say what. 

I really can't think of much to say about this book. It was pleasant enough but didn't really grip me so much? So about three stars. 

Holding Court

By K.C. Held.

(Eponysterical?)

This is about a teenage psychic who works at a Renaissance-faire castle and has to solve a murder mystery while pining over her crush/coworker. You'd think this would hit all my buttons, but the execution was kind of off for me and I ended up slogging through it somehow.

Juliet "Jules" Verity (again, the name...) comes from a family of psychics. Her grandmother matchmakes people via auras and her mother can sense the truth behind any antique. Jules, alas, has what she calls "Psychic Tourette's," in which she randomly blurts out a sentence that makes no sense to her (or usually the listener) and then later does. Her grandmother likens it to the Butterfly Effect,   After her mom leaves the country for the summer, which somehow puts her out of a job, she gets hired to be the "Mad Maid of Kent" at Tudor Times, which is now being hosted in a castle. The owner's experienced the family psychic powers in action, so he's fine with that. Jules goes for the job because her longtime crush Grayson works there, but his longtime girlfriend Bree does too, and Bree is so nice you could never want to poach.

Then on her first day, Jules finds a hidden corridor and a dead body, but by the time she can get anyone else to come, the body is gone, leading people to wonder... well, you know. Jules has to figure out who the body is, where the body is, and what is going on around the castle, while risking her life here and there. 

This is not a bad idea, mind you, but somehow I was just not that into it. It seems really...I dunno, super juvenile somehow and I can't explain why? (Especially odd since it was in the adult section of the library and shouldn't be.) I liked how the Psychic Tourette's clues worked out, especially to those who actually knew what they meant. The case ends up being a bit ridiculous (especially at the end) but it works out. Grayson, of course, likes her after all. 

I dunno, it was just kind of okay for me somehow and I can't explain why. So, three stars. Others may like it better.

A Study in Honor

By Claire O'Dell.

This is an alternate future where there's a new Civil War breaking out and Holmes and Watson are now black lesbians.

Okay, I'm interested.

Dr. Janet Watson had a bullet shatter her left arm when she was serving in the military. She got a very old robot arm that she can't do much with and she's in the position of having to politely beg the VA to give her one so that she can still do surgery and thus do her job...which isn't happening. She needs a job and ends up basically taking down patient information while being nitpicked at it like she's a retail worker, too. However, a friend of hers lines her up with a fancy new roommate, a secret government agent named Sara Holmes. That whole last bit is odd but Janet goes along with having a snoopy yet friendly roommate who cooks dinner, gives her presents, and has random people over a whole lot. Then Janet is affected by a mysteriously ill military patient who dies unexpected. After Janet does a bit of investigation, she gets beat up on the street and Sara suspects something and decides to get herself involved in the case. 

What's done well here? The character of Janet. I'm not an expert in PTSD, wars, losing limbs, etc. but as far as I can tell the character is really well written. You get Janet's pain, her issues, her frustration at dealing with life as it is now when she feels that she should be doing better and deserves better. At one point she writes in her journal, "I WILL HAVE MY VICTORY. I WILL HAVE MY LIFE BACK. I SWEAR IT." Wow. So I really liked her.

As for Sara: she's a lot nicer/more sympathetic version of Holmes than I've seen before, and kinder. She calls Janet "love" like they're already romantically involved (I will slightly spoiler and say the relationship never quite goes that far) and Janet finds that odd. However, in the end she's too mysterious and enigmatic in a sense to really get her. I really liked how this review phrased it. The relationship never quite gels into ...whatever it's supposed to be. And it felt like it took a long time for the mystery to take off and then it goes to fancy sci-fi places and then just ends very quickly. The execution of that was a bit off.

Overall it has its weaknesses, but I liked it. So, three and a half stars. 

 

 

The Alice Network

By Kate Quinn.

This is an excellent book.

It's 1947, and Charlie St. Clair is a former "good girl" who got depressed after her brother killed himself after WWII, got pregnant, and now has been hauled off to France by her mother to get her "Little Problem" taken care of. Charlie, however, is much more interested in trying to find her favorite cousin Rose, who grew up in France and disappeared during WWII. Charlie has one lead--the name of a woman, Evelyn Gardiner, who mentioned Rose in a report she did when she worked at a bureau looking for refugees. Evelyn is extremely unwilling to help, but once Charlie mentions that Rose worked at a restaurant in Limoges called Le Lethe run by a Monsieur Rene, Evelyn stops in her tracks and is much more willing to help Charlie in her search? Why?

Because Eve Gardiner was a spy during WWI, working in occupied Lille for a collaborator, Monsieur Rene, at a restaurant called Le Lethe. She was a member of the Alice Network, a network of women spies using flower-themed names and nicknames. Their leader, Lili, is nothing but super damn awesome, a master of disguise and acting and has tons of style and flair and tosses off brilliant lines. Everyone loves Lili, except the enemy. However, Eve's employer Rene is super, super perceptive and decides that he wants to make her his mistress. Since this book goes back and forth between seeing Eve as a young innocent spy and a very broken-down, alcoholic, PTSD-suffering torture survivor in 1947, you know that didn't end well for her. But there's still more mystery to be solved, as it turns out that Rose was in a similar situation to Eve during WWII, that Rene wasn't dead like Eve was told, and not everything is how she thought it was.

Accompanying the ladies on their journey is Finn, Eve's driver, a nice fellow, former soldier, and ex-con who can't get hired anywhere else. When not having his own PTSD issues (this book reminded me of reading Maisie Dobbs with all of that), he's an excellent supporter, backup and true friend, and love interest for Charlie. 

Overall, this is really great. Charlie decides to take charge of her own life and make her own decisions, and Eve confronts her ghosts, literally. There are moments of "OMG" and sadness and triumph. It's really affecting, especially given what Eve went through along with the rest of her network. I about choked when Eve found out what happened with their last big news--oh my god. 

This book is also based on the real life "Lili" and Alice Network, with some real people mixed in with the fictional. The author did a really good job and I highly recommend this. So, four stars. 

Divided in Death

By J.D. Robb.

This is book 18 in the series, heck if I know where it is in the mix of other books in the series I've read.

Anyway: this one features Reva Ewing, who's (a) Roarke's assistant's daughter, (b) a former Secret Service agent and security expert who now also works for Rourke, and (c) a happily married woman. Oh, wait on that last one. Reva's just been sent a ton of evidence proving that her husband, fancy artist Blair Bissel, has been boinking her friend Felicity Kade. When Reva storms the castle to yell at them, she finds their two corpses, and soon after seems to get knocked out herself. She wakes up, calls her mom, who calls Rourke, who tells Eve, etc. 

It's pretty obvious from the getgo that Reva was set up, what with the "oh, your husband's cheating" package thing. But it turns out that Reva was being targeted by evil secret agents, and then Eve and company need to figure out what's going on with that, who's involved, who's actually dead, and what went down. That part is pretty interesting, if quickly wrapped up.

The other main mystery in this one is Eve and Rourke finding out that their shitty criminal dads knew each other AND that Homeland Security was spying on Eve's dad, knew he was molesting her as a child--and took no action on this whatsoever (but did cover up her murder of him). This leads to some agita between the two of them as to whether or not Rourke is going to take revenge on Eve's behalf or not. You can probably guess how that ends, or you've already read other books in the series.

About like most of the books: enjoyed the overall plot but probably won't be super into this one in the long run. Three and a half stars.