It's going to be interesting reviewing this book and not giving away anything important. I hate spoilers and try not to put them in my reviews but this book...? This book is a whole shelf of parfait's worth of layers.
In The Thirteenth Tale, we are introduced to Margaret Lea, a somewhat reclusive bookworm who lives above the antique bookstore her father runs. Margaret spends most of her time reading old books and diaries, rebuilding the past of their former owners. She even states that she loves books and dead people who wrote them and doesn't have much time or interest in more contemporary fiction. That's until she gets a mysterious letter at the bookstore. Turns out that the letter is from the equally reclusive and elusive Vida Winter, one of the world's most popular author. After years of dodging reporters and interviews, Vida has decided to tell her true life's story and decided to tell it to Margaret.
After the initial shock of being saddled with such a wild task wears off, Margaret agrees to stay at Vida's estate to begin the interview to end all interviews. What unfolds is an amazing story of a once proud family that steady descends into ill-repute and scandal, then straight out madness. As the layers of Vida's story unfold, Margaret is pulled deeper into her dizzying tale that reveals a family past that would be too much for Maury or Springer, but yet one that is still wrapped in layers of secrets. Vida is still holding back and Margaret is set on discovering the truth. Margaret and the reader steady follows Vida down a twisted and creepy rabbit hole where clues to the truth are left in libraries, shadows, and in the yellowed pages of old first editions of Jane Eyre.
Much like Jane Eyre and other Gothic, 19th century novels, Setterfield builds a world of isolated landscapes, haunted English manors, and a hinting of perhaps a supernatural element. Is there really a ghost at the core of Vida's tale? Or something that's more earthbound and more horrible? And as Margaret sinks deeper into Vida's secrets, she comes face to face with her own family's secrets. Margaret and Vida's world is very atmospheric and envelopes the reader with every page, with every new secret and scandal, with each strange parallel that links the two women's lives. I must admit, that the first 3-5 chapters were almost this book's undoing for me. Either it was Setterfield establishing Margaret's uber immersion into her world of books, or it was the author's background in literature, but it felt that someone was trying too hard describing the antique books and their histories with heavy-handed words. Thankfully, once Margaret left the bookstore the heavy prose shifted and it was much easier to read. Setterfield also masterfully built the suspense and tension within the story with a deft execution of the art of misdirection and subtly, writing devices not seen delivered to this level in some contemporary fiction.
On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give this book a 6.5-7. It's a solid story, full of creepy mystery and suspense, but almost too much subtly at times that left this reader pondering about somewhat crucial pieces of information at the end. If you like your stories moody and atmospheric, that make you think, and have surprising scandals, you'll enjoy this book.
It's been a while, but I'm back! I'll spare you the dullness of why I've been MIA since June and get right into the review.
Extinction Machine, the fifth in Maberry's Joe Ledge series, does not fail in living up to
the previous four installments. We join up with Joe a few months after the events of Assassin's Code, and from the first pages we hit the ground running.
Hungover and still recovering from a night of pleasure with a dangerous woman, Joe wakes up to a world where the whole government is after him for crimes he never committed (cuz, face it, if he had, he'd admit to them in a heartbeat). Joe, his Echo Team, and the very DMS is under attack from the government all the while strange things are flying in the skies and the word "UFO" is starting to be tossed around with a lot less skepticism than a few days before.
A super secret group of three, one of whom is an industrial titan with a blank check from the US military complex, are sitting in the shadows pulling strings and picking up pieces of strange technologies that may or may not be from beyond the skies. As Joe and the Echo Team tries to stay ahead of the government's unrelenting push to dismantle the DMS, they delve deeper into the dark and slightly crazy arena of conspiracy theories, shadow governments, aliens, and a Black Book that apparently holds the key to the earth's survival. And that book is rumored to be in the hands of a woman who is the nation's foremost authority on conspiracy theories... and who may not be what she seems.
Maberry delivers again with his pitch-perfect blend of action, suspense, and enough testosterone that threatens to give the reader contact 'roid rage, and yet is able to sneak in some genuine emotion and depth to the characters to keep them from being one dimensional brutes. He also continues to make the extraordinary plausible, dare I say believable. In previous adventures Echo Team has encountered zombies, genetically modified soldiers, and vampires (as well as numerous other baddies in the short story collection that fit in between the main novels), now Maberry brings us aliens. Aliens. And yet, the concept of life beyond our planet doesn't seem campy or extrapolated within an inch of the allowances of fiction.
Again, I really can't recommend this series enough. I can't recommend Maberry enough. His Joe Ledger series is a delightfully hyper-masculine romp while his Rot & Ruin series is a heart-breaking, devastating view of death and survival at the end of the world, and the Dead of Night series is a brutal front row seat to the zombie apocalypse. I have yet to read his Pine Deep series, his very first trilogy, but I will track them down and devour them to continue my Maberry binge.
All right, now what you've all be waiting for. My rating of this book. On my scale of 1 (literary hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss), I give Extinction Machine a solid 8. Towards the end there was just one little hiccup (it'd be a spoiler, so I'm not going to explain) that kept it from being a 9.
So, there you have it. Go forth and read!
