Indie Book Review: Thaloc Has A Body

Anyone who read the review I did of Death Has A Name knows that I'm a Brodie Wade fan.  He's that perfectly adorable combination of vulnerable, unstable, wounded, and sweet that just makes you want to take him home, clean him up, and make sure he's safe and protected forever.  Basically, if you've got even the tiniest bit of Florence Nightingale in you, you're going to love Brodie.

So, I was immensely pleased to see him come back for Thaloc Has A Body.  In Thaloc Brodie's got a whole new set of mysteries to figure out.  Phil Dawson, his friend the police detective, is stumped.  People are getting killed.  Heaping piles of evidence point to the murderers, but it just doesn't feel right.  Those people are acting innocent and have no motives.  Then the final straw, one of the killers is a dead man.  Phil calls in Brodie, and the two of them start chasing down a killer who can look like anyone, leave hair, fingerprint, and clothing evidence, and is on a killing streak.  Meanwhile, The Truth, Brodie's link to the paranormal, has been pretty well behaved in the wake of Death Has A Body, but well behaved isn't the same thing as silent.  It's telling Brodie his wife and death, who are one in the same, are approaching.  

There were some issues I had with Death, lack of back story, rushed ending, slightly flat secondary characters, all of which I was hoping to see improve in the next book.  And in most of these issues Hanel delivered.  Thaloc takes care of the back story issues.  How did Brodie and Phil get together?  Why are they friends?  What kind of guy is Phil?  All answered beautifully.  Jamie Stanton, who was briefly introduced in Death comes back as well, and she's also nicely rounded out in this one.  Brodie, as always, is a glittering diamond of a character.  And, because the Truth is backing off a bit, we're getting to see what a functional Brodie, a man who's just starting to trust that maybe the world isn't going to explode around him in the next five minutes, looks like.  I like functional Brodie just as much as messed up Brodie.

Pacing is still pretty quick.  Hanel has taken the mantra "Do Not Bore The Reader" to heart.  There is no wasted time in this plot.  If something is happening in the story, it's important.  Pacing is also fast in the sense of how quickly characters developed.  Personally, I'd like to see the character development slow down a little.  But, I'm guessing the target audience for this book will be fine with things fast.

Once again, the ending seems a bit rushed.  Hanel writes a big climax and then sort of skimps on denouement.  There are two major bombs thrown at us at the end of the story and a little time to see Brodie deal with them would be nice. 

We get some romance in this installment which I enjoyed.  I like seeing Brodie happy.  And for most people happy involves more in the way of companionship than a cat.  Granted, I would have expected him to be a bit more shut off, but the romance wasn't totally out of left field.  It is (as I eluded to before) fast.  But not ridiculously fast, no one is declaring undying love on day two of the romance.  And, I'd like to give Jerry some serious points for this, from everything we can tell Brodie is a virgin, which fits his character perfectly.  There is nothing I find more off-putting than running into a socially awkward, emotionally wounded character who as soon as he gets into the bedroom turns into Mr. All-The-Right-Moves-Sex-God!

There was one note in this story that rang false to me.  Phil is the sort of character who's had a very, very bad time with religion in the past and it's left him hostile to the idea of God.  And he's so deeply uncomfortable with the idea of God that it threatens to wedge a rift between him and Brodie.  But he has a sort of no-atheists-in-foxholes moment toward the end of the book.  Now, I know some pretty hardcore atheists, some of whom have been in foxholes, and they tend to get annoyed at the portrayal of when the chips are down they start praying just like everyone else.  Given Phil's back story, and the way he reacted to Brodie and Jamie talking about God, his sudden prayer struck me as more Jerry making a point, than something Phil would genuinely do.

But as quibbles go, that's a pretty minor one.  Once again I fully enjoyed spending time with Brodie.  Once again I can't wait to see what's coming next for him.  The end of Thaloc left a lot of interesting possibilities for our leading man, and I'm looking forward to seeing where he goes.

The Indie Book Review: Freedom's Sword

I like historical fiction.  I like military history.  I like Scotland.  So I was pretty sure I'd like Freedom's Sword, and as I turned off my kindle after reading the last word, I sat back, relaxed, and enjoyed my visit to the first Scottish War of Independence.

A little background: Scotland was once upon a time a completely free and independent entity from England.  But back in the 1200's a squabble between potential claimants to the throne ended up with Edward I deciding he was in charge.  This sparked the first Scottish War of Independence.  Most Americans are vaguely familiar with this because we've seen Braveheart.  Unlike Freedom's Sword, Braveheart played pretty fast and loose with the facts to make a romantic, compelling story.  Tomlin thought the truth was compelling enough, and from what I can tell stuck pretty closely to it.  Personally, I agree with her.

So, as the tale opens we meet Andrew Moray, brand new knight about to go off on his first battle.  It goes horribly, he's taken captive, and after months of torment in an English dungeon and a breath-taking escape, he returns to Scotland with a burning desire to reconquer his homeland.  From there we follow him as he rounds up a force of like minded men and retakes northern Scotland from the English.

It's a good story.  And I read most of it over the Forth of July weekend, so a tale of booting out the English seemed especially resonant.  Battle scenes are vibrant without being overblown.  Details of place are in enough depth to give an image of what is happening, but not so dense that you need to hack through them with a machete to find the plot.  Most of the secondary characters are well enough defined that you won't confuse them with each other.  The history is well researched and alive.  It's what moves the story along as opposed to being scenery. 

If I wanted anything from Freedom's Sword, it was actually more history on what exactly was happening and why.  I'm well versed on medieval history, weaponry, and tactics, so I was following along pretty well, but a bit more on how Edward I ended up in charge, why they were rebelling against him in the first place, how things were different under Toom Tabard, why Robert the Bruce was a natural claimant to the throne, and how the Scottish political system worked would have been useful.  With Tomlin's obvious love of the subject and deft writing, I would have been well pleased by another fifty pages of background.

There was one jarring aspect of Freedom's Sword.  For some reason it suddenly shifts point of view (POV) to Caitrina, Andrew's Lady.  And while I thought more or less everything involving Andrew was interesting, I rapidly lost interest when the story shifted to Caitrina.  (Fortunately it didn't happen too often.)  It's not that her story was badly written, nor was it boring per se; it just didn't have a lot to do with the rest of the plot.  There's nothing that happens from Caitrina's POV that couldn't be dealt with in a few lines of dialog with her talking to Andrew.  There's nothing added by hopping to her head.  She's so tangentially related to the plot that at one point twenty-seven chapters go by without a mention of her.  It almost feels like there was a plan to do a secondary story line of life on the home front, but somehow it didn't make it into the final story.   Personally I would have liked to have seen that sort of a storyline.  I think Tomlin could have done many fine things with it, but that will have to remain in the wish stage.

Beyond that my only other complaint was the lack of idea of when thing happen.  We get one date stamp in the beginning of the tale and another at the very end.  Some in between would have made it easier to keep track of what was going on. 

All in all I enjoyed Freedom's Sword quiet a bit, and look forward to seeing what else Tomlin will come up with. 

The Not Even Remotely Indie Book Review Strikes Back: Storm Front

I know, I know, I'm late to the party.  It's 2011 and I'm just getting to know Harry Dresden.  But, as they say, better late than never, and in this case, it's much better late.

I read for characters.  That and dialog are my things.  Give me a fantastic character with a great voice and I'll forgive a lot of writing sins.  So, as you can probably guess Harry Dresden was right up my alley, and Jim Butcher is a good enough writer there weren't many sins I needed to forgive.

Oh, and I should probably mention I'm a massive James Marsters fan, and he's the guy reading the audio version of the book I was listening to.  Even if I wasn't a raving Spike fan, I would have considered this an extremely well read audio book.  

Harry is a perfect combination of gallows humor, never-give-up tenacity, snarky-wit, and anti-authoritarian attitude.   Basically, he's almost exactly what I want in a leading man.  James Marsters does a fantastic job of bringing that to life.  It is a deeply satisfying combination. 

I love a well-thought-out, detailed system of magic.  And Jim wrote it for me.  Wrote it beautifully with hints of way more going on beyond the surface than is specifically told to us.  Wrote it with enough detail so that the mythos feels real and works.  And though I haven't read books 2-12 I'm quite hopeful that he's not done such a good job setting this up to then turn it on it's head and throw the laws out when they become inconvenient. 

As for those sins I mentioned earlier, really there was only one, too much going over the same turf again and again and again.  Quick example: Butcher wrote a scene where Harry's shield bracelet got slagged, he then had Harry tell me it was destroyed two, four, and seven pages later.  (I'm guessing on the pages since I was listening to the book, but you get my drift.)  I doubt Jim Butcher will ever read this, so I'll address this advice to other writers: if you show us something important happening, you do not then need to tell us it happened over and over.  Occasional reminders might be nice, once a large chunk of story has gone by.   Your reader is smart enough to remember details for more than five hundred words.

All in all, I was greatly pleased by this addition to my slowly growing collection of trad published books.  Fool Moon is definitely on my to be read list.

To Tag or Not To Tag:

That is the question.
'Tis nobler to suffer the finger cramps of furious clicking
And the wasted time of promoting others
Or stand against the waves of popular wisdom
And proclaim a tag free strategy?

So, I'm very obviously not Shakespeare.  (On the off chance that being female, a novelist, and alive didn't already tip you off to that.)  But I do think I know something about tagging on Amazon and would like to pass it along.
 
For those of you out of the loop, tags are those little notes you can attach to any product on Amazon to make it easier to find.  Products usually have some tags already, and if you agree with them, you can click on them driving the tag numbers up, or you can add your own.

If you click on the box below, you'll get to my book.  Scroll down past the publisher info, blurb, and reviews, and you'll find the tags.  I've got over 200 votes on my most popular tags.  I got them by the fairly common technique among writers whereby we swap tags.  You tag mine, I'll tag yours, and we're all happy in the end.  I have spent, literally, over an entire day tagging other people's books so they would tag mine.

Now, Amazon has requested on the CreateSpace page that authors not swap tags.  That they do not approve of gaming the system.  I can understand that.  After all, the tags are supposed to be for the customers to help them find things other customers thought fit in certain categories.

I know this is bothering some writers, but I'm supremely non-plussed.  (And not just because I've already got a lot of tags.)  See, I've come to the conclusion that tags are not a wildly useful way to spend your promotional time.

Why?  Well, first off let's talk about what a tag isn't.  They aren't keywords.  They also aren't a way to boost your book higher on the main search page.  If you go to Amazon's main page, and type in a search term, the first zillion items are ones that have that term in the title.

If you refine your search by going to the advanced search options, you can search by keywords.  You cannot search by tags.  If you search by keyword, what pops up are books that have the keyword in question.   Having a lot of tags can help a bit here, but not in a direct way.  If the person doing the keyword search clicks on an item, and then scrolls all the way down to the bottom of the product page, items with similar tags will pop up. 

If you want to search by tag, you have to click on a product, scroll down to where the tags are, and then click on the search by tag feature.

So, we'll start off with the fact that tags are not the most easily accessible search tool on Amazon.  And, because of that, they are likely also not the most used search feature on Amazon.   People who know and regularly shop on Amazon may use them, but the casual user is unlikely to be finding your book by it's tags.

Then, there's also the fact that tagging takes time.  If you want a lot of tags, you've got to give a lot of tags.  Given how handy and easy to use tags are for the average person searching for your book, I'd say there are a lot of better ways to use your promotional time.  My 200+ tag votes took me at least thirty hours of tagging other people to get.   At this point in my career I've got the number one book for Justice, Fate, number two for True Love, and similarly high numbers for most of my other tags.  I'm not burning up the bestseller list, and having done a very quick audit of the other books at the tops of those categories with me, neither are they.

So, thirty hours spent dominating categories no one is searching... or thirty hours spent getting to know people online, reading books to review, tweeting, posting on the blog, or any other promotional opportunity?  I know for a fact people have bought my book because of time I spent engaging with them online and writing blog posts.  I don't know that anyone besides me has even seen my book based on it's tags, let along bought it.   And judging by the sales numbers of the other books at the tops of the tag heaps I checked, it's not helping them either.

I'm not saying tags are useless.  I am saying that if you've got any other way you can spend that time that might attract readers to you, do it instead.

Ye Gods II: Outskirts Press Responds

So, a while ago I wrote a post instructing authors to run screaming away from Outskirts Press.  They just noticed I wrote it and responded.  Now, for some reason I'm not seeing their comment on the original post, so I thought I'd copy it and respond directly here:

Keryl, You're right, our pricing is much different from CreateSpace. If you look deeper, you'll discover that our fee-based services are actually lower than the fee-based services offered by CreateSpace. Please feel free to re-examine their service fees on their website and then perhaps post an update to your blog that more accurately reflects our value. We're happy to help you do that by providing some some details below for your convenience:

CreateSpace offers something similar to our Ruby ($699) or Diamond ($999) packages for $785 and you can see those details on the CreateSpace website at https://www.createspace.com/Services/TotalDesignFreedomStandard.jsp

Although this service doesn't include some the inclusions of our Ruby or Diamond packages.

When you examine CreateSpace's service fees, you may notice that their a la carte prices are actually quite a bit higher than ours. For instance, they charge $499 (https://www.createspace.com/Services/UniqueBookCover.jsp) for the same custom cover design that we charge $299 for.

Their copyediting service is $0.019 cents per word (https://www.createspace.com/Services/ComprehensiveCopyediting.jsp), whereas ours is $0.014 cents per word. For an average 60,000 word document, that equates to a difference of $300 less with Outskirts Press at http://outskirtspress.com/p/editing

As for marketing services, their prices are actually quite a bit more expensive than ours. Their press release with distribution service is $598 (https://www.createspace.com/Services/PressReleaseWithDistribution.jsp ) compared with ours for $219 at http://outskirtspress.com/p/customrelease (and if you published with us, it's even less).

Their book video service is $1,249 (https://www.createspace.com/Services/VideoBookTrailers.jsp

) compared with ours at $799, and our authors save 50% off that price! As a CreateSpace author, is CreateSpace offering you a 50% discount on their "egregious" book video fees? Want a less expensive one than you can get anywhere else? http://outskirtspress.com/p/videotrailer

Speaking of not free, CreateSpace even charges $199 for Sell Sheets (https://www.createspace.com/Services/SellSheets.jsp), whereas Outskirts Press authors can print (and even create/modify) their Sell Sheets within their Publishing Center freely whenever they want.

It's true CreateSpace doesn't offer the Amazon Extreme services, although based upon their prices above, if they did, you can bet their prices would be more than ours.

All that, PLUS you get your paperback on Barnes & Noble. The good news for CreateSpace authors is that even if you publish with CreateSpace, you can benefit from affordable Outskirts Press marketing options at http://outskirtspress.com/marketing

Sincerely,

Outskirts Press

Now, everything they've got posted there may be true, but, that was not the point of my original post.  I compared what it costs to get a book printed with Outskirts to what it costs to get a book printed with CreateSpace and with Lulu.com.  I did this with a professional author, someone who is trying to make a living selling books, in mind.  They didn't mention Lulu in the response, so I'll skip it as well.

To make a physical book, with an ISBN, barcode, distribution to major retailers (including Barnes and Noble and Amazon), and a customizable cover costs $39.00 on CreateSpace.   That $39.00 gets you the option of something like 15 book sizes, more than 20 customizable covers, and two paper colors. 

Outskirts' least expensive option is $199.99.  They take your MS and turn it into a book.  There is no barcode, no ISBN, no distribution.  You have the option of one size, one paper grade, and one of two customizable covers.  They then give you one "free" copy.  

You've got an MS.  You want to sell it.  Which of those two options looks better?

Now, let me go a bit further.  Outskirts does not appear to make the bulk of their money printing books.  They appear to make their money selling services to authors.  They may or may not have better prices that CreateSpace, but here's the thing, I don't recommend using any of the a la carte services of any of the DIY publishers.  They are, for the most part, a waste of money.  Go find places where other indies hang out, make friends, and you can find those same services for a much better price.  Better yet, learn how to do a lot of them yourself.  

There was one service Outskirts offered that really pissed me off, and it's mentioned briefly in the response above:  The Amazon Extreme Service.  It cost $299.00 and gets you three things, a Kindle version of your book, the Look Inside feature for your book on Amazon, and ten tags.  Words are insufficient to explain how big of a rip off this is.  This is taking advantage of people who don't know how CreateSpace or Amazon DTP works and robbing them blind.  So, let me take a minute here to explain in detail what sort of work you'd have to do to get these things for yourself.

A: Go to CreateSpace and set up a book.

B: There will be an option that says something like: Amazon Look Inside: yes or no?

C: Check the yes square.

You are now signed up for Look Inside.  Depending on how fast with a mouse you are, that took you less than one second.

D: Once your book is up live on Amazon, scroll down your product page.

E: Find the tags section.

F: Type in the tags you want.  (Outskirts will type in ten tags.  Amazon lets any user add up to fifteen.) 

To further hammer home exactly how blindingly easy the tag thing is, authors routinely do tag swaps.  I click on your tags, you click on mine, both of our books are a little easier to find.  And (this is something I'll go into more detail on in a later post) it's also not all that useful.  Tag is not a synonym for keyword (which is an impression Outskirts tries to create) so the only way a lot of tags makes it easier for someone to find your book is if they specifically search tags.  I've got over 200 votes on the tag "true love" for Sylvianna, which means Sylvianna is in second or third place for total "true love" tags.  If you search keyword, true love, books I didn't write pop up.  How many tags of true love does the number one book on the list have?  Zero.  So, not only are they selling you a service that anyone can do for free, it's not even terribly useful.

But what about getting your book up on Kindle.  That's hard and scary and requires a lot of technical savvy, right?  Um... no. 

A: Fill out forms (Outskirts sends you a copy of the forms, and you fill them out, then they reenter the data.)

B: Copy and paste all the information (category, back cover blurb, etc...) from the print version into the kindle version.

C: Upload your .jpeg cover image

D: Upload your .doc text.

Congratulations!  In two or three days you've got a Kindle book. (Or, according to Outskirts: four weeks.)   From the way they describe what they do, it looks like someone at Outskirts signs you up with Amazon DTP.  Which, once again, you can do for yourself for free.

All told, it took me less than half an hour do to all three of these things, and less than a minute for the first two.  I'm not a computer wizard.  But I can read, and I can follow simple directions, and I sure as hell don't need to pay someone close to three hundred dollars to do that for me!  You don't either.  As I said in my previous post, if you want someone else to do this, go find someone charging about fifteen dollars, which is a decent price for the amount of work involved in doing this.

Once upon a time services that catered to self-published authors were called vanity presses.  They were called this because, by the time you were done, you had a book to stick on your shelf at home, sell to a few friends, and that was about it.  If selling your books is your career, if you want to make a living at this, if you want something beyond your name on the cover of a book, Outskirts is a bad choice.  They charge too much.  Here's how my 424 page, 9x6 novel does at a $14.99 price point with about a 40% author discount:  CreateSpace, I make $3.03 per book sold.  Outskirts, I end up owing them $2.27 for each book printed.  I have to jack the price up to $16.95, and then I only make $0.42 per book.  If you sign with Outskirts you cannot price your book low enough to compete with the hordes of people publishing on CreateSpace.  And that, more than any other reason, is why you should run away from Outskirts.  

Indie Book Review: Black Earth The End of the Innocence.

I started Black Earth: End of the Innocence with a lot of hope.  I did my usual pre-review routine of reading the blurb and the first chapter.  Both of them looked good.  The first chapter is arresting and sets up the promise of a really interesting story.  I was happy to agree to review Black Earth.

Unfortunately Black Earth starts going downhill from there pretty swiftly. 

This is a big book, and it's the first in a series with, I think, thirteen point of view characters.  It's entirely possible I've forgotten a few.  On the upside I rarely found myself confusing them with each other.  On the downside the whole book is more or less character introductions, a little back story, and a tiny bit of plot.   I read the kindle version, so I'm guessing here, but this is probably a 400+ page story where by the end of it we're just starting to get a feel for what might be going on.

What is going on?  It's hard to tell.  The world is falling apart.   Meteorites are crashing into the planet.  Aliens or demons, possibly alien demons, are ramping up for war against God.  Teenagers with superpowers are fumbling around trying to figure out what is going on.   The President of the United States appears to be the Anti-Christ, or working for the Anti-Christ, it's fuzzy.  There's some sort of time-travel-fix-the-future, and counter-time-travel-keep-the-future-the-way-it-is angle.  Other planets have been destroyed by Legion (the alien demons).  There's something about getting humans off of Earth to a new planet (which may have been destroyed in the future, by Legion) so they can evolve and avoid the destruction of Earth.   There are bad guys galore (more on this later), and absolute scads of purposeless violence.    Any one of these threads could have been a book by itself, but they're all scattered together, and none of them developed enough to do more than give the reader a glimpse of a building story.  Basically, we get to read the first third of something like six books.

And then it just stops.  Part of how a series is supposed to be built is that each part is a story of its own.  Look at Harry Potter, each of the novels has a complete story arc while building up the larger arc of the series.  It's possible one of the arcs this story began with ended.  All the rest of them are left dangling.  If there is an overarching theme of this book, it's everything falling apart, and that's well and truly going gangbusters by the time Black Earth has ended.

There's a saying: a book is only as good as its bad guys.  And while that isn't always true, clunky, melodramatic villains will just kill a book.  Unfortunately Black Earth has a lot of them.   There's Evanescence, Witch Queen of the Damned (something like a Super Satan), The President of the United States (the Anti-Christ?), Mr. Silver (misogynistic, super-rich-corporate-tycoon-James-Bond-style-villain),  Alpha 1 (psychopathic killer working for Mr. Silver), Theresa (counter time travel sociopath), and a few other random psychopaths.  And all of them need mustaches to twirl.   There is not a single subtle, sane bad guy in the lot.   Be prepared for clunky dialog; psychopathic musings; megalomaniacs; ice-cold, stone-hard killers, who can be distracted and overpowered by untrained victims; random, useless violence; and monologues that give the good guys the chance to escape.   

Good dialog makes me want to sing the praises of a book.  Bad dialog makes me want to cry.  This book is riddled with stilted and stiff dialog, mostly coming from the mouths of the bad guys.  On top of that most of the characters use the same basic vocabulary.  Quick example: things are falling out of the sky and crashing into Earth.  With the exception of one NASA scientist, everyone calls them falling stars: not meteors, meteorites, comets, shooting stars, or anything else.  All of the characters have precisely the same internal vocabulary for this event, even the ones who come from another planet.  Here's another example: no one curses.  At first I thought this was a young adult book, but no, it has a not-suitable-for-under-17 note on it, so there's no reason that no one ever utters 'shit' or 'fuck.'  There are some seriously scuzzy people in this book and one rough teenager, and none of them ever says anything beyond a PG rated word.   Not to say I'm a fan of profanity for profanity's sake, but I am a fan of realistic dialog, and at the very least, the kind of teen girl who sets up her own sex club in high school is likely to mutter something untoward upon finding she's been drugged and raped.

And that leads into another aspect of this book, it's Christian fiction.  (Not that you can find this out by reading the description or the genre.   Why this isn't mentioned in the description or genre is puzzling.)  I think this is why no one curses, even though it would be in character for at least a few of them to be doing it.  This might also explain the fact that there is only one gray character and everyone else is fully a black hat or white hat.

I like eschatology, and while there's a lot of creative work going on in this version of the end times, it's heavy handed.  The President is a bad guy.  How do we learn that at first?  We find out she's had the "under God" bit removed from the Pledge of Allegiance.  As a work of theology goes, this one isn't sophisticated.  There's plenty of room for theodicy in this story, but either his characters or Alderman isn't up to it.  Instead of spending some real time on what it means that an all powerful God allows evil and suffering, we get the tired tropes of 'it makes us stronger' or 'keep the faith.'

Then there's writing as a technical aspect of putting words together.  Parts of this book are eloquent and graceful.  Parts feel like a car with a shot suspension driving over a pitted, rocky, country road.  Word choice was problematic.   Alderman often uses a word that sounds similar to the one he wants, but isn't it: equitable for equal or correlating for corresponding.  Likewise he comes up with sentences that sound good, but don't actually mean what I think he was trying to convey.  Point of view is also an issue.  He's either writing third person omniscient badly, or head hopping from one third person limited to another.  Either way it's distracting.  You think you're in one character's head, next thing you know there's an info dump involving stuff the character shouldn't know, then you're in another character's head.   Top this off with many scenes ending in a cliff hanger, and when next we see those characters they've suddenly gotten off of the cliff, without Alderman bothering to tell us how it happened.

All of this is excruciatingly disappointing because the first few chapters are good.  Alderman can write decent teenagers (adults and children not so much).  The first chapter has stunningly beautiful imagery and makes you want to read more.  The first few chapters that follow were good enough I kept working out so I could read more.  (And I'm not what anyone would call a fan of the elliptical machine.  Reading the beginning, my normal twenty minutes grew to thirty before I hit the first rough patch.)  Then suddenly, it all goes awry and we're stuck in the land of stilted dialog and insane bad-guys.  I'm giving it two stars, and wishing the promises of the first chapters could have been fulfilled.

Indie Book Review: Optical Delusions In Deadwood

Deadwood Violet is back in Optical Delusions, and she's brought along all the things I loved about Nearly Departed.   Witty writing, killer dialog, red-hot sex scenes, a corker of a mystery, and a tinge of paranormal that leaves the reader wondering if the supernatural is really happening or not have all come back for Ann Charles' sophomore offering.

In the wake of the action in Nearly Departed, Violet's developed something of a reputation as the local spook finder.  All the more ironic because Violet still doesn't really believe in ghosties and ghoulies.  But, setting fire to the "haunted" residence of the local psychopathic killer will get you that sort of reputation.    Newly minted reputation in hand, Violet gets approached by a small, mousy woman in need of a realtor.  In a matter of minutes, Violet knows why she was picked, the house, in addition to having a reputation for being haunted, was also the location of a murder-suicide a few months earlier.    

On the good news front, the house is perfect.  On the better news front, the Sturgis Harley Davidson convention is on, and Deadwood is packed with out-of-towners, some of whom are looking for real estate.  On the downside, something just isn't right about the owners, and that triggers Violet's need to get down to the bottom of what is going on.  She's thinking it's a simple matter of a not-all-there mother being taken advantage by her daughter and almost daughter-in-law.  But of course, it's so much more than that.  Next thing Violet knows she's got witches, demons, and spooks in her life again, and she'd really prefer they weren't. 

If that was all the plot this story had, it'd be a great read.  But it's not all the plot, the Deadwood mysteries are romances as well as who/what-done-its.  I'll admit to being a bit disappointed in the romance for Optical Delusions.  When we left Nearly Departed, Doc and Violet were heading toward happily ever after.  There were some big obstacles in the way, and I wanted to see how they would deal with them.  Two weeks later we begin Optical Delusions and apparently during the intervening time Doc's character got a personality transplant and went skittering into hiding because he's oh-so-scared of a real relationship.  So, for all practical purposes Doc and Violet go back to square one and start over again in Optical Delusions. 

Now, the actual romance plot line of: guy acts like jerk, guy decides he can't live without woman, guy does valiant things to get back into woman's good graces, forgiveness, and happy time is just fine.  It holds together well and works.  Charles handles it with grace and wit.  But I was hoping to see the romance actually move forward, as opposed to end up in precisely the same place it was when we got done with Nearly Departed.  None of the major issues facing Doc and Violet as a couple are any closer to resolved.   He's still a psychic.  She's still not sure she believes such things are real.  Her best friend is still in love with Doc and she's not sure how to handle that. 

And, while I wouldn't call that a minor issue with the book, it is one of personal taste.  Optical Delusions is extremely well written.  The characters are vibrant and spending time with them is a genuine joy.  The mystery has twists, turns, red-herrings, and fully satisfying ending.  Charles' ability to balance paranormal creepiness with the real world and leave the reader on the fence as to what is actually going on is reminiscent of the best episodes of the X-Files.   Plot threads that were sprinkled into both Optical Delusions and Nearly Departed look like they'll get picked up in the third book.  This is another carefully written, carefully plotted book.  I want to know what happens next.  I just hope it doesn't involve Doc and Violet heading back to square one again.