Once again I’m participating in a huge sale with lots of other authors who are all members of Backlist e-Books. We have books at deep discounts via Smashwords from now until Sunday, May 22. For details and a list of books and authors visit the Backlist e-Books Newsletter
Since everything was messed up last week, and I am scrambling to get ready for a two-week book tour, I am sharing another book review written by Carl Brookins. Those of us who use his reviews would be lost if we couldn’t rely on his submissions when we are desperate for content. And just wait until you see what I pre-schedule here the weeks I am gone. Enjoy…
Devil’s Plaything
By Matt Richtel
ISBN: 978-1-59058-887-1
Released, 2011, 324 pgs,
Hard Cover.
This is a novel born of the twenty-first century. It is technology-rich,abrupt, punchy, and filled with first-person pithy observations. It has a modern complicated plot and some dark conspiracies worthy of flat-worlders and those who still appear to believe the landings on the moon were merely another government scam.
Blogger Nat Idle is drifting through life as a medical reporter and occasionally paying attention to his rapidly aging grandmother, the only member of his family in close proximity. When he and Grandma Lane are on a casual outing in a San Francisco park, a mysterious stranger, apparently driving a Prius, shoots at him, or her, or them. How could this gentle,rapidly aging woman, with no apparent enemies attract an assassin? Not possible, so it must be Nat who was the target. After all, he was engaged in a controversy with some San Francisco cops about Porta Potty corruption.
The novel uses a criminal conspiracy of immense possibilities and proportions to raise questions about the rising dependence on technology to replace our individual memories, and to sermonize about American society’s eagerness to shuttle its older generations into places where they can die out of sight and mostly out of mind. Those shortcomings aside, the novel develops and carries along an inventive idea that is highly fraught with tension and believability.
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Carl Brookins
www.carlbrookins.com, www.agora2.blogspot.com Case of the Greedy Lawyer
Bloody Halls
I don’t usually like a book that preaches to me, but I like “highly fraught with tension and believability” books. Thanks for the review.