I have followed Kate Beaton's work since I first saw her comic Hark! A Vagrant on LJ many moons ago. I'm still holding out hope that one day I can just marry her sense of humor.

As is her wont, Beaton has combined major historical giants (Napoleon, in a manner of speaking) with much lesser known figures (Average Medieval Peasants™) to round out this collection. It's ALL good, but her Nancy Drew will always be my fave.

"He wore too much aftershave. The fragrance was as aggressive as everything else about him. Top note sandalwood, bottom note obnoxious."

Nice.

(Sidebar: why is sandalwood such a popular descriptive smell for men in contemporary literature? Is it a remnant of the sexed-up outdoorsy lumberjack Alpha Male trope?)

The Mermaid Murders had a tidy mystery that mostly kept my attention, though there was a strange loose end with one of people of interest that never got resolved. That's allowed, supposedly; the narrative does say "it wasn't against the law to be a very weird guy."

What keeps this from a higher rating, for me, is how West and Kennedy went from zero to rutting against a flimsy motel door in nothing flat. The author used the premise of alcohol as impetus, which, ugh, a bit overused but for good reason, I guess. (Another sidebar: West is a bit of a lightweight if two kamikazes can make him that hazy, hah!)

NEW THINGS I LEARNED:
⇴ California Impressionist artist Granville Redmond paints lovely landscape scenes.

INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY? Pft. Move over for Court Gentry, the sweaty, occasionally bearded American man of bad decisions, but many guns.

Corporations run (and ruin) the world. One of them has taken exception to an operation Court has fulfilled because money talks, very loudly. The money in question is in the form of a multibillion dollar contract from the dead target's brother, a stereotypical African despot. Court's handler, Fitzroy, is blackmailed into giving him up (that's what happens when you are a spymaster with family to lose, dumbass). Court, while a technically a mercenary, has a very strict code of ethics regarding which ops he will deign to take. Everybody loves a killer with morals, amirite? Nothing new under the sun, if you read enough thrillers and watch enough shoot-em-up films!

But! Being done before doesn't mean Mark Greaney hasn't done it excitingly here. I especially loved the scene between the exfil team and Court in the Lockheed - it was excellently choreographed and easily visualized. Stick that zero gravity hotel fight from Inception on a plane in a nosedive with spec ops bros and you've got a very intense handful of pages!

I mean, for real. Court shot a dude just to hitch a ride out on the parachute attached to said dude's unconscious body, which he then landed on with a great crunching noise. Later on, he gets a stab wound in his abdomen sutured by a terrified vet's assistant while driving the world's smallest car on his way (almost literally) to storm a castle. As the great philosopher Xander Cage once said, "I live for this shit."

(Sidebar: Greaney gave the Korean operative three family names, so hopefully that's a codename and not just a gross neglect of bare minimum research. Song Park Kim is like an American being called Johnson Smith Jones. Ridiculous.)

On the downside, the writing is not always the cleanest - Greaney tends to switch between calling Court by his first name, his last name (Gentry) or his code name (The Gray Man) seeming at random, sometimes within the same paragraph. And the extensive descriptors in place of pronouns! I thought I had left that behind with fanfiction; at least there's no bluenettes involved this time.

Is this a great literary masterpiece, destined to change your life, your worldview and maybe convince you to tour Europe on a quest to find yourself? No. But if you're looking for an adventure novel filled with gratuitous violence and a man who manages to collect injuries like Pokemon, The Gray Man is totes for you. Look out sequel, here I come!

P.S. What the hell happened in Kiev?! This is the Noodle Incident all over again.

NEW THINGS I LEARNED:
Five-by-five is not a catchphrase used solely by Faith Lehane, but is actually a response used to describe the quality of radio communications. Egg on my face, for sure.

I went into this hoping for something like Andrews' The Edge series or even Briggs' Mercy Thompson series, but instead got weirdly detailed prose and a whole lot of nothing happening. Another reviewer said it best with this: "Though I generally enjoy extravagant prose (Beagle, Kay, Valente), this is awful. Layered on and stretched thin (see what I'm doing there?), Saintcrow has traded in Spartan style for Valente on crack."

Sigh. High hopes, dashed upon the rocks.

[Reread 09/05/16: Still excellent.]

This is a story of a hitwoman who is hired by a hitman to join a group of hitmen to track down and eliminate a serial killer who is also a hitman-gone-mad. Got it? Great.

Knowing what I do of Armstrong's other series (romance-heavy), I was not expecting to enjoy this as much as I did. Nadia is my favorite type of heroine - she's smart and tough and has her own moral code based on personal experience, rather than a naive understanding of the world. She's a former cop who comes from a family of cops with a tragic backstory that only underscores her interest in the pursuit of justice. During one of her cases, it becomes clear to Nadia that the suspect will literally get away with murder. She makes a career-ending decision to play God. Her colleagues and superiors believe her actions to be a result of PTSD and gently drum her out of the service. She attempts to another lifestyle (lodge owner! guide for extreme sports!), but it leaves her in dire financial straits. Would she do it again? Probably.

Coincidentally, a mobster's son comes to stay at her lodge with friends and her connection to the seedy underground is born. She has specifics on what kind of hits she will take, but does not have any qualms about the killing once it's been decided.

I like that about a girl.

Anna was in fine form during the entirety of this novel. She is perceptive and emotionally astute and uses these skills in a kindly manipulative way. I can appreciate this gift of strength just as much as the genre-traditional badass biker chick cliche.

That being said, the antagonist of Dead Heat is unclear and lacks a convincing edge of villainy. Only two of the child victims are given any semblance of personality (

and both come through the ordeal relatively unharmed

); over time, it becomes difficult to feel the horror of nameless deaths in an attic. The reveal of the fae at the climax of the novel seems like a run to the finish line without the requisite warm up.

The subplot of this novel is one that is common in most series after the main relationship is resolved - the issue of children. It is something I have come to dread, because the notion has little appeal to me and my fictional choices are all about escapism.

I liked the idea of Xanth prior to being slapped in the face with the incredibly gross portrayal of women (or nymphs or anything that looks vaguely female and humanoid). When I started this series as a preteen, I was only peripherally aware of these weird descriptors, though I do remember being uneasy about Anthony's obsession with young girls and their relationships with horses.

As I got older and slightly more worldly, I realized how much I hated any time a woman would be on page, because something disgusting would be in the prose with regards to her physical person. I stopped reading Piers Anthony when it dawned on me that it would never get any better. It's really a shame his writing drips with such perversity, because the core ideas could have been worked into a really great thing (or several great things!)