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Redemption- Jacklyn A. Lo

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This has elements from a mix of genres; including supernatural, spiritual, romance, sci-fi, and speculative fiction. Overall, it is well written and very entertaining. I particularly enjoyed reading this as a series of short-stories, being only disappointed with the lack of connect between the science fiction, the regressive themes, and the end of the book. The past lives are all exciting reads, though saddled with my common complaint that it is funny how more often than not past life memories are of infamous and famous events and times, rather than of ordinary lives. This makes for good entertainment, whilst reducing plot 'credibility'. A-Lo, if this is 'future biography', certainly gets the Halo. However, the bar to reaching redemption is set so high that I'm quite sure I'd be stuck in Limbo, or Clapham, or Mean Street forever. Perhaps like most superb destinations the already resident wish to stop 'Heaven' getting too crowded. Only special frie...

Missing You- Michael R. Jennings

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     Jennings has developed a good plot line into engaging entertainment of the modern Mills and Boon variety. The story centres on the relationship between a rich, career minded, single, businessman and a mother separated from a drug dealing father. The child goes missing in the aftermath of an earthquake. The relationship between the mother and the child runs rather superficially, as a background to the developing bond between the main character and the mother. A think that unless there had been very strong relationship difficulties between mother and child, which their apparently weren't, the loss would have impacted more forcefully on the adult relationship. Readers will draw their own conclusions. However, I'm sure I won't be the only one that sees this as strange. Having pointed up this one possible flaw, the story works well in all other respects.      Apart from some rather avant-garde verb structures the style of writing works well. These const...

Blood for Blood- D. S. Allen

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Good historical thriller, which fitted in well to what I believe I know about 17th Century 'British Isles'. The plot had many stock historical themes from the Civil War and Protectorate periods. That isn't a criticism, as historical fiction without strong anchors in well studied events is very difficult to buy into. The book is well enough written, conveying all the hardships and customary behaviours associated with those torturous times without every straying far into harsh graphic detail. This creates a book for a very wide readership. We are given the colours and outlines, being left free to paint the stronger images for ourselves. That doesn't mean the story lacks bite, far from it. The characters are drawn with a depth of individual and understandable emotions and prejudices, especially in the light of the historic backdrop. As one living much of my life in one of the last country houses to hold to the King, in one of the strongest Royalist areas in the Civil War...

Troubles- Ian Miller

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As the book starts we are already on the other side of a dystopian meltdown. The rebuild, worldwide will be painfully slow, but progress will be made. The story is set in one small area, the area that will be served by one new power station. Some of the wealthy, in their gated communities have come through a worldwide conflagration relatively unscathed, not so most of the population. There is a lot of excitement, heaps of intrigue, and a very clever interplay of characters in the plot. Sometimes the detail was actually too clever for me, to mathematically complex, but I breezed on to find, as I suspected, that the maths of who did what to whom and when didn't particularly matter. The story is in the series of results from the complex interplay of competing and variously empowered players. I don't hesitate in giving this book five stars, but the proof-reader needs eliminating and replacing before the next book, just as unceremoniously as are so many of Miller's characters...

Clear Line of Site- D. C. Black

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My initial enjoyment was thrown a bit by some unnecessarily sloppy grammar, but don't let this put you off. The book develops into good quality thriller. However, the version I read does need one more edit. For some reason the standard of editing improved with a few strange reverses as the chapters rolled by. The plot is very exciting, though in places the unsavoury activities didn't actually need even the depth of description they got. Some of the descriptions of physical assault walk the line between suspense and horror. But yes, the script does depict the terrible realities that victims of perverted sexual crimes sometimes face. It is clear from early on in the story that Black has a good grasp of the technologies that drive the plot, and an interest in some of the wider debates driven by Edward Snowden et al., our general worries about cyber terrorism and financial exploitation by criminals inside and outside our governmental and financial institutions. At first, I thoug...

Mindclones- David T. Wolf

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There aren't too many science fiction books that are quite so positive about near future sciences that may well allow the 'cloning' of the human mind. I got the strong impression that Wolf is contemplating/dreaming a life for himself as an artificial intelligence when his body gives up the ghost, the 'soul'. We see the dream of a 'heaven', a life beyond the disposal of our corpses, a continued existence in the digital world. We see Wolf's hopes for adding the other senses, than just easily achievable hearing and sight; namely touch, sensation, sentient feeling to his future non-biological self. He guards against the evil inside us all by allowing the earliest freed mind, his Adam, to set strong moral parameters to all future behaviour patterns. Wolf seems to be considering his own moral architecture as the ideal, as seen in the many personal 'political' imperatives he works into the plot. The book comes through to me as being deeply unreligi...

Kings of delusion- E.J. Findorff

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This is an exciting fiction thriller, set in real life, real time events. The book has an important sub-text that explores the collapse of social norms in a population under extremes of stress. The backdrop to the plot is the catastrophic environmental disaster inflicted on the City of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. This is a classic modern thriller read, with the expected adrenaline surges sure to hit most readers at the end of every chapter. There are also many of the twists common to the 'Whodunit' genre, in this story that centres on paedophilia, depravity, the treatment of the old, the struggles of the poor and corruption in high and low places. Extra poignancy is given to the plot by the author's personal life experiences in and around the streets of that most exotic of cities. The great many real characters on which Findorff has based his fictional ones have helped him weave such an exciting and disturbing story. This work is less scary in a bloodthi...