The Elementary Sherlock Holmes by Portico

The Elementary Sherlock Holmes by Portico
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

‘To a great mind, nothing is little’ Sherlock Holmes Sherlock Holmes has become such an iconic figure that he’s almost real. He’s on our TV screens, he’s in our films and, of course, the books are still as popular as ever. This fascinating little miscellany tells you everything you need to know about this enduringly popular figure, and lots of stuff you don’t! It contains the plots of all the novels, character descriptions, details of some of the plethora of Sherlock websites, and highlights the best films and TV adaptations. Entertaining and engrossing, The Elementary Sherlock Holmes will satisfy the curious and enlighten even the most dedicated Holmes fan.

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This is a perfect book for fans of the new tv series Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Or for those who before  never ever really cared about Sherlock Holmes, or *gasp* never even heard about him.

It's a fun book to read, a quick read, but for people that know quite a lot about Sherlock Holmes, that have for instance read some or all the books, seen the movies with Basil Rathbone or the excellent tv-series with Jeremy Brett (R.I.P my one and only true Sherlock) then this book will not really satisfy you.

But as an introduction to future Sherlockians, then this is perfect!

Thank you Netgalley for providing me with a free copy for an honest review!

Breaking Love Book Tour by MJ Summers

Breaking Love by M.J. Summers
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Single mom Megan Sullivan travelers to Paris to visit her best friend Harper who works there. On a night out she meets Luc Chevalier and it doesn't take a long time before they hook up. But a casual fling with a sexy Frenchman is soon turning into something more serious for Megan, but does Luc feel the same way? Can Luc a man who never ever thought about settling down with a single mom change his womanizing ways? 

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I feel like I'm the odd one out seeing all the glorious reviews for the book on Goodreads, but I never found the book any good. I wasn't that found of either the characters or the story and there seem to be a trend by the all the romance books I have read lately to include lots of graphic sex scenes. Well, it is a smart way to sell books, there are probably many people that enjoy reading about sex in books, I just get bored lol, I just wished that the story in the book would have been better. But it's like watching an action movie where 90% of the budget went to special effects and 10% to the script. You get a lot of explosions but not a good story. This book felt like that. It was very predictable. I will not go into details since I don't want to give away the plot. But I like books that surprise me, Breaking Love never surprised me, and I was often forcing myself to get through it.

Last I will leave you all with a quote that really made me dislike Luc: “This is confusing. You're obviously attracted to me - Which is, of course, how it should be - but you don't want to be with me? How is that possible?" he asked with a teasing grin.” Yeah, Luc, she is a woman she must be attracted to you, you big stud muffin! (of course, she is but she is written to fancy him, but if a man said anything like that to me, that I must be attracted to him, I would have been pissed off by his ego!)

Thank you Piatkus for providing me with a free copy for an honest review!

Pet Sematary by Stephen King

Pet Sematar by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

November Buddy read RMFAO (Reading My Frigging A** Off)!

Sometimes dead is better....When the Creeds move into a beautiful old house in rural Maine, it all seems too good to be true: physician father, beautiful wife, charming little daughter, adorable infant son -- and now an idyllic home. As a family, they've got it all...right down to the friendly cat.But the nearby woods hide a blood-chilling truth -- more terrifying than death itself...and hideously more powerful.

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I dreaded reading this book because I've seen the movie and I knew that it would hit hard even if they had done a hell of a lot changes from the book to the movie adaption. There were changes, and even though it is ages since I saw the movie last time I feel that the books are way better than the movie, much better. But now I want to re-watch the movie to see how much they changed the story. Most been 5-10 years since I last saw it, perhaps I will like it better now...or perhaps I just will like it less since I liked the book so much.

I think one of the reasons they fail when they do movies of Kings books (well they do succeed of course sometimes like the Green Mile) is when they take away the heart of the story and just focus on the horror. Yes, King writes horror books, but like with this one, it's a hell of a lot more than just horror, it's about grief and family...and death. Sometimes dead is better...

It was a hell of a ride, and I enjoyed the book even though I read it with dread...

Revival by Stephen King

Revival by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A dark and electrifying novel about addiction, fanaticism, and what might exist on the other side of life.

In a small New England town, over half a century ago, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister. Charles Jacobs, along with his beautiful wife, will transform the local church. The men and boys are all a bit in love with Mrs. Jacobs; the women and girls feel the same about Reverend Jacobs -- including Jamie's mother and beloved sister, Claire. With Jamie, the Reverend shares a deeper bond based on a secret obsession. When tragedy strikes the Jacobs family, this charismatic preacher curses God, mocks all religious belief, and is banished from the shocked town.

Jamie has demons of his own. Wed to his guitar from the age of thirteen, he plays in bands across the country, living the nomadic lifestyle of bar-band rock and roll while fleeing from his family's horrific loss. In his mid-thirties -- addicted to heroin, stranded, desperate -- Jamie meets Charles Jacobs again, with profound consequences for both men. Their bond becomes a pact beyond even the Devil's devising, and Jamie discovers that revival has many meanings.

This rich and disturbing novel spans five decades on its way to the most terrifying conclusion Stephen King has ever written. It's a masterpiece from King, in the great American tradition of Frank Norris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe

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For a while, I actually thought that this would be the first book I would give five stars to in ages. But in the end, it just got four stars. Why? Because of the ending. I just didn't like it very much. It was very depressing and for some reason, it felt like a letdown. All I could think was: "Is that all, have I been reading all day for that kind of ending?" I would rather have had a more ambiguous ending to the story. Instead of just a very bleak ending. (I need to read something cheerful after this...) However, I'm sure there are people that will love the ending, and it was not a bad ending, but perhaps I'm just a gal that what some hope in the end...

The rest of the book was great, I love Jamie and his family. I love watching him growing up, hell I would have loved reading a book about Jamie's life without Charles Jacobs. I know Jamie would have been a hell of a lot of happier without him in his life. Stephen King is a master telling tales, he has an uncanny ability to create interesting characters (both good and bad) and this book is one his greatest!

The drop by Dennis Lehane

The drop by Dennis Lehane
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Three days after Christmas, a lonely bartender looking for a reason to live rescues an abused puppy from a trash can and meets a damaged woman looking for something to believe in. As their relationship grows, they cross paths with the Chechen mafia; a man grown dangerous with age and thwarted hopes; two hapless stick-up artists; a very curious cop; and the original owner of the puppy, who wants his dog back. . . .

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This is the first Dennis Lehane book I read that doesn't star Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. The Drop is based on a novella called Animal Rescue that was turned into the movie The Drop which Lehane wrote the script for and then turned into this book. All and all was this a good book.

Bob is an ordinary guy, a bit too ordinary for my liking I thought when I read the book. He works at the bar, goes to church every Sunday but it was finding the puppy that really changed his life, made him suddenly snap out of his monotone life. Throughout the book, I mistook him for being a too soft guy, but then the ending comes and then I realized that the person you should be worried about was not Eric Deeds, the psycho who claimed to own the puppy, but Bob, the kind, and shy bartender... So this book gets 3,5 stars. It was not as good as other Lehane books I have read, and it would have been just 3 stars if not Lehane had turned the table and made the ending quite spectacular.

#BookReview Fiercombe Manor by Kate Riordan

Fiercombe Manor by Kate Riordan
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

A house as old as Fiercombe Manor holds many secrets within its walls. But which dark chapter of its history is haunting Alice, a young woman staying there during the course of a fateful summer?

In 1933, naive twenty-two-year-old Alice is pregnant, unmarried, and disgraced. She can no longer share her parents' London home, so her desperate mother concocts a cover story and begs her old friend, Mrs. Jelphs, for help. The housekeeper at rural Fiercombe Manor, Mrs. Jelphs is moved by Alice's "plight" as a new widow and agrees to watch over her in the secluded English countryside until the baby is born and given up for adoption. Because the manor house's owners, Lord and Lady Stanton, no longer live there, Alice's only company will be Mrs. Jelphs and her skeleton staff.

Thirty years before Alice's arrival, Lady Elizabeth Stanton awaits the birth of her second child, fervently hoping he will be the boy her husband desires. But as her time nears, she is increasingly tormented by memories of what happened with her first baby and terrified that history will repeat itself . . . with devastating consequences.

At first, Fiercombe Manor offers Alice a welcome relief from her mother's disapproving gaze. But she begins to sense that all is not well in the picturesque Gloucestershire valley. After a chance encounter with Tom, the young scion of the Stanton family, Alice discovers that Fiercombe's beauty is haunted by the clan's tragic past. She is determined to exorcise the ghosts of the idyllic, isolated house.

Nothing can prepare Alice for what she uncovers. Can she escape the tragic fate of the other women who have lived in the Fiercombe valley?

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I requested The Girl in the Photograph from Netgalley and then I found an interesting book called Fiercombe Manor on Edelweiss and requested it. A while later when I had been granted access to them both did I realize that it was the same book. The Girl in the Photograph is the English book and Fiercombe Manor is the title for the book in US and Canada. I chose to read the Fiercombe Manor since the text was formatted better in that version.

This is the kind of book I like, a historical fiction/mystery. I love reading parallel stories, and in this book we get to follow both Alice and Elizabeth and as the story proceeds we get to know what happened to Elizabeth in the past at the same time as Alice in the present discover it. Now, the book wasn't that great that I had hoped it would be, but it was a good read and above all it was interesting even though I felt that story dragged on a bit in the middle, but I was probably just a bit impatient. I also liked the characters, I didn't even mind the budding romance between Alice and Tom Stanton.

So if you like historical fiction/mystery books then this is a book for you!

Thank you Netgalley/Edelweiss for providing me with a free copy for an honest review!

#BookReview Mayhem by Sarah Pinborough

Mayhem by Sarah Pinborough
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A new killer is stalking the streets of London’s East End. Though newspapers have dubbed him ‘the Torso Killer’, this murderer’s work is overshadowed by the hysteria surrounding Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel crimes.

The victims are women too, but their dismembered bodies, wrapped in rags and tied up with string, are pulled out of the Thames – and the heads are missing. The murderer likes to keep them.

Mayhem is a masterwork of narrative suspense: a supernatural thriller set in a shadowy, gaslit London, where monsters stalk the cobbled streets and hide in plain sight.

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The story in Mayhem is about "The Thames Torso Murders of 1887-89" with a paranormal twist to it. I didn't know before I read Mayhem that Jack the Ripper wasn't the only killer on the loose at the time. Sarah Pinborough has taken real characters and used them in this book, which was a great move to make. Police Surgeon Dr. Thomas Bond who is the MC in this book worked on the case IRL.

I had forgotten what the book was about when I started to read it. I didn't even check up the book on GR to refresh my memory so I was a bit surprised when the book turned paranormal and frankly I would have preferred an ordinary crime novel instead of paranormal one. But it was a good read, not as good as I had hoped it to be. I would have preferred a real flesh and blood killer instead of what I got. But, I should have checked up the book before I started to read.

But I liked it enough that I look forward to reading the next book in the series! And the cover for the next book is just as gorgeous as this one (yeah I'm a cover junkie)!

A Spell of Vengeance (Thieftaker Chronicles, #0.5) by D.B. Jackson

A Spell of Vengeance by D.B. Jackson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ethan Kaille is a thieftaker in Colonial Boston, scratching out a living by restoring stolen property to its rightful owners. But unlike others in his profession, Ethan relies on magical spells as well as his wits to track down thieves. Being a conjurer doesn’t make him popular with the law in Boston, so Ethan is taken aback when the sheriff seeks his help in settling a dispute between a pair of wealthy merchants and a ship’s captain who has threatened their lives. Ethan knows the captain can back up his threats with magic of his own. But there is more to this matter than the merchants have let on, and Ethan soon discovers that what he doesn’t know might actually kill him. D. B. Jackson’s first Ethan Kaille novel, Thieftaker, will be published on July 3, 2012

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I think I'm a tiny bit in love with Ethan Kaille, just look at the cover to this prequel to the first book and also the cover to the first book that I added *swoon*...I know, I know, looks isn't everything, thank heaven then that he is a really interesting character also!




I was glad to read this prequel since that got me a chance to see if this series is any good, now I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on the first book...and the second and so on...

Thanks I for the link to the short story!