nocto

This is the first book for *years* where I've actually guessed the culprit correctly early on in the book, and the fact that i did so didn't spoil the book at all. If anything it made the book more enjoyable for me because I could see all the twists and misdirections as they occured and I appreciated the cunningness of the plot more than I might have done if I'd have waited to have the mystery unvelied for me.

Another point in favour of this book is that I think it's the first one in this series that I've read (I've read all the first six now, albeit not in the correct order) where the central trio of detectives come out more or less intact. There's plenty of action without them all ending up badly hurt (though one of them has to end up in hospital of course, I don't think it would be a real Castlemere mystery without the hospital featuring!).

Bannister's characters are wonderful and though I still worry about their chances at longevity I'm going to be with them all the way in this series.

Just a quick note on the title: "Burning Desires" was switched to "A Taste for Burning" for the American market. Following hot on the heels of "Sins of the Heart" which was retitled to "Charisma" I have to wonder who was making up these titles? Someone who wanted mysteries to get confused with romances? The mind boggles.

Purchased on 15th February 2002.

I'm up to the fourth installment in the Kate Shugak series; in this episode Kate is working undercover on the Trans-Alaska pipeline way north of the Arctic Circle, she's trying to discover who is importing and dealing cocaine on the oil companies property.

These books are a really quick easy read, this one only comes in at just over 200 pages in paperback, but they've got far more substance to them than many thicker tomes have and I'm really surprised how much interesting stuff is packed between the covers. Kate has a habit of forgetting what she's supposed to be looking into but the rather minimal mystery plot isn't a problem because it gives Stabenow enough breathing space to explore other things: Kate's Aleut heritage, life on the pipeline (a lot cushier than I'd have thought and definitely a step up from the last book where she Kate was working on a crab fishing boat), archaeology in the Arctic, and so on.

This was definitely the best in the series so far and I'm pleased I have further to go with this series than I've come.

Purchased on 16th April 2002.

[these comments are taken from a mailing list discussion and may contain spoilers. since i made up the questions for this discussion book i've posted them in full.]

WE'VE MET OUR HEROINE MEG GILLIS:

• EX-COP,
• MIKE'S PARTNER IN A SECURITY BUSINESS,
• CHARLIE'S WIDOW,
• JOSH'S STEPMOM.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF HER? WHY DO YOU THINK SONGER CHOSE TO GIVE HER ALL THESE ROLES AND DO THEY ALL WORK COHERENTLY FOR YOU?

I like Meg but I find her a bit jumpy in more than just her thinking. I liked the fact that the author had tried to round her out with different aspects to her life but I didn't feel that they all fitted together that well in this book. One thing that bugged me was that apart from references to her being in the office doing the books on a Saturday she seemed to have no business troubles at all with Mike missing and not getting anything done herself. Perhaps I'm just being picky but that screwed up the realism aspect of the story a little for me.

One of the things that annoys me sometimes with many fictional investigators is that they seem to have no family to worry about them when they leap into danger. When I discovered that Meg was a widow I thought she was going to be pressed from that mould. So I was pleased to find that Josh was part of the story though he did seem to drop in and then drop out. But Josh's presence is a good sign of a decent series character to me.

I think Meg's status as an ex-cop is what defines her more than anything though I'm confused with how little she seems to know about the officers policing near her home today, only three years after she left the force. I gather she lives in a different jurisdiction to the one she worked but it still doesn't ring quite true that no one she's known in the past seems to be around.

So I think Meg's a interesting character with plenty of promise but she hasn't quite come to life for me yet.

HOW DO YOU LIKE THE AUTHOR'S WRITING STYLE? (GO ON, VENT!) IS THE LACK OF ANY REAL CRIME BOTHERING YOU? HOW ABOUT THE FACT THAT MOST OF THE STORY IS ABOUT MIKE WHO WE HAVEN'T EVEN MET? DO YOU HAVE A FAVOURITE AND/OR LEAST FAVOURITE MOMENT IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE BOOK?

I wouldn't want every book I read to be written in the style that BAIT is, but I found it very easy to read, it flowed pretty easily out of Meg's head and into mine. The way that Meg's opinions were interspersed into the conversations worked for me, I didn't have to remember the whole conversation and wait for her reflections at the end, it was all just there for me as I went along. And I don't even remember the italics so they couldn't have been causing me any problems either.

The lack of a central plot/dead body/concrete crime of some description didn't bother me much until I stopped to do some QM type summing up and realised that there wasn't really anything tying things together and not really any crime about. I found Meg's voice interesting enough to keep me reading but can see why other's might put the book down and not pick it up again.

Others have already mentioned the scene where Meg spots her kitchen light is on and can't remember if she left it that way. I liked that scene too, I thought it was nicely suspenseful, though I was ultimately a little disappointed by the reason, I think I was after a bit more action.

I thought the bit where Meg does the house tour for us was the low point of the first half and I keep expecting the layout to prove important to the plot in a chase scene or something, like I'm going to get tested on knowing the way from the one part of the house to the other. I'd rather an author gave the readers a map if it's really that important that we know where the pantry is in relation to the bathroom. The kind of description Meg gave us belonged more in a country house puzzle mystery than in this book.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE POLICE CHARACTERS? DO YOU THINK REILLY WILL TURN OUT TO BE ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS OR NOT? DO YOU FEEL THEY HAVE ANY JUSTIFICATION IN SUSPECTING MEG? DO YOU (OR DID YOU) HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT DIRECTION THE PLOT WAS GOING IN AT THE HALFWAY POINT?

I agree with Donna's great description of the police: "there's only one. He just puts on a different outfit". This book seems to have hardly any characters in it. There's Meg and Reilly. Then there's Charlie (dead) and Mike (missing). There's Josh too but he's not a full part really. The interchangable policemen were about the only other people we met in the first half. Oh and Mr Haro...(I won't murder the spelling) who had a walk on/walk off part.

My feeling was that Reilly was going to turn out to be a baddy since we don't have very many other suspects for anything. Either that or Meg was behind everything all along and whilst "the narrator dunnit" has been done before I really didn't think that was going to happen here.

The police seemed to have very little reason for harrassing Meg. I can see that once they've decided Mike is into bad things they can suspect her by association but they seemed to be taking things too far. Which in my book was another good reason to suspect Reilly.

DID THE RESOLUTION OF THE PLOT MAKE SENSE TO YOU? DID YOU EXPECT THE LINK TO CHARLIE'S MURDER AND DID IT WORK FOR YOU? HOW ABOUT THE LINK TO THE IRANIANS? DO YOU FEEL THAT THE AUTHOR PLAYED FAIR WITH THE READER?

DID YOU FEEL THAT MEG WAS "BAIT"? IF SO, WHY? (OR WHY NOT?)

I got totally confused at the end of this book and had a hard time formulating a question about it as I couldn't get it straight in my head what happened at all. Up until the last few chapters I was enjoying the book and not worrying about what was happening and waiting for the wrap up to make sense and I was disappointed when it didn't really come together.

I thought the link to Charlie's murder could have been quite clever, it was there in the foreground and we knew about it but thought it was background material and not part of the main plot. Somehow it just didn't work for me though. I think that there wasn't enough explanation at the end. In the rest of the book Meg repeated details to us many times but at the end we only got one shot at understanding what was happening. I felt like very little had happened for a long time and then all of a sudden a ton of things happened at once and I couldn't get my head round them. It didn't feel like a fair ending to me.

I was disappointed with Mike too, I was expecting something more interesting to happen there. One of the few bits of the resolution I really liked was to do with the photo of her and Charlie that Meg found torn in half by Mike. I liked the fact that Meg thought this was saying something about what Mike felt about their relationship when Mike had actually torn it in half to show the photo of Charlie to the witnesses. Although now I think about it it doesn't make that much sense - we're told Mike took lots of photos so it'd be unlikely he'd need to dig out one he'd never shown to Meg and rip it in half when he'd be likely to have photos of Charlie alone anyway? Oh well, it worked for me for a while anyway!

The idea of Meg as "Bait" seemed like it ought to be central to the book and the title made sense to me as soon as she was lured to the Iranian gentleman's house and fell into the hands of the cops. I thought that perhaps the cops harassing Meg was a ploy to draw Mike out of hiding or draw Charlie back from the dead (stranger things have happened in fiction...) or something similar but nothing like that played out really. I thought maybe Meg was supposed to be the Bait in the bar scene at the end but the analogy didn't work there either. It seemed to me that the title could have been dreamt up by someone who had only read the beginning of the book or a synopsis.

WHAT IS YOUR OVERALL OPINION OF BAIT? DID THIS FEEL LIKE A FIRST BOOK TO YOU? WILL YOU BE READING THE NEXT INSTALLMENT IN THE SERIES? WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO HAPPEN NEXT?

WHAT WERE YOUR FAVOURITE AND LEAST FAVOURITE ASPECTS OF THE BOOK? IF YOU COULD HAVE CHANGED JUST ONE THING IN THE BOOK WHAT WOULD IT HAVE BEEN?

It definitely felt like a first book to me, not so much because of the writing style but because of the lack of structure. I didn't mind the writing style at all though giving Meg someone else to talk to wouldn't have hurt. I got really tangled up with what was going on at the end of the book and wished that the author had made all the connections clearer. I felt like I'd been completely red herringed for 250 pages and that what happened in the last 50 pages had little to do with what came before.

Overall I'm giving the book an about average rating, on the plus side I liked Meg and enjoyed her style but on the negative side I wanted a stronger story for her to be involved in.

I've already ordered the next book on the off chance that the plot is stronger though from comments made here recently I think my trust might be misplaced. Nevertheless I want to find out what does happen next. In an ideal world I'd like to see the books concentrate on Meg and Mike's security business and the ongoing relationship between the two of them, I feel that Mike ought to be the confidante and colleague that was missing in Bait.

If I changed one thing I think I'd tie the thread with Soufi in more tightly and have the body appear earlier in the book to save the "Sue" thing from going on to long and to give the police something concrete to try and pin on Meg to justify her paranoia.

Purchased on 30th March 2002.

2 copies of this book are available on BookMooch.

This is a fascinating book about how languages evolve and change over time and shows how languages are both born and die. Most of the bits that I've remembered whilst reading it are about the English language but there are interesting titbits about all kinds of languages in here.

I've always had a problem with the description of English as a "Germanic" language when it seems to me that our vocabulary has far more in common with the Romance languages that evolved from Latin. The author explains that this actually makes sense because English and German are linked far further back in time. This means that the basic words in English and German have more in common than English and French, for instance: bread, brot and pain; fish, fisch and poisson, water, wasser and eau; the German word is much closer to the English word than the French one. However when we get to words for more complex ideas English is much more likely to have borrowed a French (or other Latin derived) word for these ideas and so the "hard words" in French are more familiar to the English speaker and it's easier to read French at a higher level than German.

Another thing I enjoyed finding out was the kind of things that seem indispensible in one language aren't necessary at all in another. Most European languages include definite and indefinite articles: "the" and "a". So when Esperanto was designed (admittedly it was only supposed to be an easy language for people who already speak a European language to learn) it included both of these articles. But many non-Europeans manage perfectly well without two separate articles finding other ways to express the difference between an object and the object. Similarly as an English speaker the idea that you need two words for "we" - one that encompasses only those present, and another than includes people who aren't present - seems pointless but many speakers of other languages would feel that the distinction was indispensable.

I could be here ages telling about why the same sound in different tones came to mean different things in Chinese, or that languages are dying out faster than ever today. (At the moment there are about 6000 languages spoken across the globe, by the end of the century it's expected that only about 500 will remain.) I especially liked the chapters on how new languages form as Creoles and how recent a phenomenom this type of language is. There's no shortage of odd bits of info to take away from this book.

There are a few problems with the book, my major complaint is that the author assumes everyone is familiar with every American sitcom ever written and I don't know how much I missed by not knowing what accents or features each character has. I read the reviews of this book at Amazon one of the complaints seemed to be that the author skipped over too much stuff (condensing the Viking invasion of Britain into a single sentence for example) but I think that there was enough detail on the whole and rather too much in places.

Definitely an interesting read with plenty to think about.

Purchased on 20th April 2002.