The Night Strangers

After Airline Pilot Chip Linton’s emergency landing in Lake Champlain resulted in the death of most of his passengers on his small plane, Chip moved his wife Emily and their ten-year old twin daughters to a remote Victorian home in Northern New Hampshire.
The plan was for Chip and his family to start fresh after the accident, but Chip is haunted by the memories of the crash, as well as it seems he is haunted by passengers that died on that fateful flight. While Chip is battling the inner demons of the 39 lost people on his flight, a long ago sealed door is found in the basement of their home with 39 six-inch long carriage bolts.
39…
While Chip makes a frightening discovery behind the bolted door… his wife Emily finds herself drawn to a group of herbalists in the area who seem to have taken an obsessive interest in her twin daughters. Torn between the strange behavior her husband is now producing as he spends more and more time in the basement, and the odd women herbalists giving her children new names… Emily is left struggling to maintain her family when all she really wants to do is pack up and get far away from this strange place.
I am kind of digging this cover...

It’s hard to believe now that in my early 20′s horror/thrillers were my favorite genre. Then, I read everything that Stephen King and Dean Koontz put out there. As years went on, I went away from King, still enjoy a good Koontz, but have really moved on to a tamer, Harlan Coben for my fix. However, occasionally I have a craving (much like I do for 80′s music), where I want to dab a bit into the spooky genre, hoping to bring back the old thrills I used to get reading them.
This fact, along with my desire to read something by Chris Bohjalian, brought me to Night Strangers. For this time of year, if just felt like it could be spooky good.
So… is it?
Well no doubt about it that Night Strangers will make you hear every bump in the night. Putting anything in the basement is pretty spooky for me and that is barely touching the hair-raising happenings of Chris Bohjalian’s tale of the paranormal.
I definitely got what I was craving and then some… I tend to lean more towards the good old spooky ghost stories than the modern paranormal horror so at times there was a bit of “WHOA!” For the most part… I would call this book a ghost story with a triple energy drink kick. After all what s not to love about a book where not all your characters are living?
If you are looking for a little spooky in your pre-Halloween week, look no further for great writing that will definitely make the hair on your neck tingle and have you checking the basement door.

Sleepers Run

Eric Caine, a War On Terrorism veteran, finds himself in a hospital with no recollection of the car crash that put him there. A missing persons report has been filed on him and that was 8 days ago!
Eric is feeling lost, confused, and alone when a chance encounter at a bar helps Eric gain a little perspective. He relocates to Venezuela where he had spent his childhood and then things take a turn again as a catastrophic event threatens the stability of the country. Eric now finds himself running for his life from a team of CIA assassins as he works to uncover a conspiracy that is nothings as it seems.
I am not much of a terrorist/war/CIA/assassin/politics type reader. Admittedly this book wasa bit of a genre stretch for me, yet I wanted to read and review it anyway.
Why?
Genre stretching is a good thing and I have found that sometimes a book out of my genre zone will grab me and if not for my willingness to stretch myself, I may have missed it.
Take Sleepers Run for instance. I did enjoy the action packed read and if ACTION is what you enjoy, Sleepers Run has it in spades. There really is no release button as you follow Eric’s story from the beginning to the breathless end 345 pages later.
Eric himself is a bit over the top as characters go…. picture MacGyver, Superman, Jason Bourne, Jackie Chan, and maybe a little Indiana Jones… all rolled into one character. Yup. Eric has moves. While at times I found this almost humorous as I thought, “how will he get out of this one….”, it still kept me turning pages to see where it was all going.
Friend and foe alike are tossed in throughout this read and I honestly never felt connected to any of them, Eric included. The book to me became more about the action and page turning then getting to know and care about any of the characters…. in the end, as I reflected on the read… I was not even sure that this was necessarily important. Perhaps a different take than my normal reading style but not a bad one… just different.
Fans of espionage type reads will probably get into this more than I did, but for this being a stretch for me… I was held enough to read through the book and enjoy it.

Anna Dressed in Blood

Synopsis
Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.
So did his father before him, until he was gruesomely murdered by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father's mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. Together they follow legends and local lore, trying to keep up with the murderous dead—keeping pesky things like the future and friends at bay.
When they arrive in a new town in search of a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas doesn't expect anything outside of the ordinary: track, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he's never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, now stained red and dripping with blood. Since her death, Anna has killed any and every person who has dared to step into the deserted Victorian she used to call home.
But she, for whatever reason, spares Cas's life.
I was looking up at my freshly organised shelves the other day and wondering what was going to make it into my picks of 2011. I've read some great books this year, books I've loved, books that I'd never let you borrow as I'd gaze at the empty space on my shelf and grind my teeth. But this year I've been feeling a little worried as there hasn't been a book that you'd have to attempt to prise out of my hands as I kicked out at you. Well, thank everything that's in the world, I've found it and it's Anna Dressed in Blood.
As the synopsis suggest, Cas lives a strange and disjointed life. He moves from city to town killing troublesome ghosts all the while knowing that this is what killed his dad. As a result he tries not to connect with anyone but drift though people's lives like the ghosts he seeks. But Thunder Bay is different. What Cas expects to be a quick stab and done turns into his biggest nightmare. People get killed and he finds that he can't work alone on this one, he might have to actually seek help. And then there's Anna who spared him the first time she saw him. He can't stop going to see her and before long he finds himself in a difficult situation.
So why do I love this book so much? First off, the voice is perfect. Cas is both worldy-wise and nonchalant but also vulnerable. He's smart too and the book crackles with humour. I found myself laughing openly to the Ghostbusters references and the way that he both reaches out to his new friends then tries to push them away. As he's initially quite a detached character, an observer, he reads people in an instant. This book also broke my heart a little as it's full of beautiful moments. I haven't even started on Anna who starts the book as a monster and then …? Well, then she becomes something else but also doesn't. I know that sounds kind of shady but I just don't want to spoil it for you so I'll leave it there.
This is no pseudo-horror either. I lived on Stephen King and Shaun Hutson at one point and some of the scenes in Anna are on a level footing of anything by them. At one point I was reading in broad daylight and still felt a chill. Cas has got himself mixed up with some magic that he doesn't quite understand. Fortunately his new friend (and psychic) Thomas's grandfather knows about all manner of things. The adults in this book are almost as appealing as the kids and I would have loved to have seen more of Gideon with his dusty books and Morfan's antique shop.
The book was a joy to read; a spooky, icky and disturbing joy. As an aside the cover is gorgeous and the print is the colour of dried blood. No, it really is. Now you'll have to buy it to see if I'm fibbing.

Don’t Blink

Who doesn’t like a big juicy steak from a world-famous restaurant such as New York’s Lombardo Steak House. The place is famous for their menu, the clientele…. and now the gruesome murder of a mob lawyer.
In the restaurant at the time of the murder is reporter Nick Daniels, conducting the interview of a lifetime with a legendary bad boy of baseball. Nick is shocked and shaken as the hit-man slips through all the activity without a hint of who he may be. When Nick realizes he actually has a key piece of evidence on his recorder, he proceeds to investigate the case himself despite dangerous warnings for him to back off.
New York’s Lombardo’s Steak House is famous for three reasons–the menu, the clientele, and now, the gruesome murder of an infamous mob lawyer. Effortlessly, the assassin slips through the police’s fingers, and his absence sparks a blaze of accusations about who ordered the hit.
As Nick continues to get closer to the truth… the truth becomes closer to him as well… first with his friends… and then even closer when they go after his family.

Chapter 2,489 ….. ha ha…. a little inside Patterson humor….
It is nothing new to hear me rave about a James Patterson audio. I have enjoyed many of his audio books immensely, especially the Mike Bennett Series he writes with Michael Ledwidge: Step On A Crack, Run For Your Life, Worst Case,and most recently Tick Tock. These books are filled with action, amazing narration, and honestly not gruesome as some of writing can be.
For all of the above reasons… I was excited to get my hands on Don’t Blink. And then…. I dont know what happened. I must have blinked.
The story line was kind of all over. I never felt I knew enough about Nick Daniels to care about him. He may as well have been named Joe Blow. He goes after a case that causes many (MANY) people to get killed. Friends, people trying to help him… suddenly it feels as though I am just read leaping from one attack to another… he barely gets out of one jam and then there is another and then anaother… and then when you think “whew… it’s over!”…
there is another.
In the end for me it was all a little too much…. enough plot here for two books. I didn’t really feel any connections to anyone and it actually became work to follow what was going on and who was after him now…
maybe I did blink and somehow missed the point, but that is my take on this one. Not a hate… just not a love.

The Night Circus

Step right up and don’t push… you will all get a chance to enter. The Night Circus is a mysterious Circus that opens only at night. It comes with no warning, and leaves the same way… but if you are lucky enough to catch it you are in for the time of your life. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves.
While attendees rave about the never-ending tents filled with amazing sights to see, what they do not see is the underlining workings of the circus. Celia, who has been raised with the circus since a child is running the Night Circus as a competition that even she does not quite understand… her opponent… could be anyone, friend or foe… she is unsure…. all Celia does know is that she must continue to work bigger and better in this mysterious game as she will soon find out – the stakes are quite high.
(push play above for a little review theme music)
The Night Circus first came to my attention at BEA this past May during a dinner with bloggers and publishers. The conversation at my end of the table was centered around a book, this book, that I had never heard of. “…as big as Harry Potter,” fell on my ears and that was enough of a sell for me. After all, have I not spent hours and hours of reading and looking for a book, a series, that has touched my life as much as Harry Potter and come up empty?
I searched the Book Expo the next day but the word was out… and all advanced copies of Night Circus were gone. I left with a promise from the publisher that they would send me a copy and yes, a couple of weeks after the expo, a lovely black and white striped circus wrapped book arrived in my mailbox. I did not remove the wrapping for the next several months… savoring the anticipation.
I started the book in print… while reading heard about Jim Dale narrating the audio version (Jim Dale also narrated the Harry Potter books) and purchased the audio version from audible.com to finish out the book.
First off know this… Celia is not the main character. Nor are the twins that are talked about frequently throughout the story – Widget and Poppet. No. The main character is indeed the circus itself. If ever life was breathed into a place, an object… this is it. The circus lives and breathes just as much as I do as I write this review.
The beauty of this book that I think could align it with the Potter books is the immense detail… carousels do not only go round and round… but beyond. Tea pots come to a boil on cue and tea is poured free hand from them. Celia wears a dress that changes color to compliment whatever the person she is talking to is wearing…a particular visual I loved were the trees that have poems running down the trunks.
At times story lines may appear unrelated…. but just wait as this is the real magic of the novel…. when it does come together there is a bit of magic to it all for the reader… I referred to it as a party for my mind.
While the book at first may appear to be all cotton candy and caramel apples…. you will quickly discover it is indeed a tightrope walk of event after event… each carefully placed to make the circus function as it does and one misstep…
could bring it all down.
Did it touch me as much as the Harry Potter books? No… but I have a lot of history with Harry. I have heard the buzz that the Movie rights have been purchased and that does excite me as I believe this read would make a visual feast. I will certainly be in line early to get my ticket.