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Book Review: Zeus, Inc. by Robin Burks

Zeus, Inc. by Robin Burks

Biting Dog Publications, 2013

ASIN:  B00DONI6LA

Available:  eBook(Kindle)

 

Alex Grosjean is a private investigator.  She spends most of her time investigating cheating spouses and insurance fraudsters.  Lately though, the jobs just haven’t been coming her way.  As she wrestles with the panic caused by unpaid bills, she gets a call from her friend Aliesha. Aliesha’s father, Joseph Brentwood, who is also the CEO of of Zeus, Inc., has been missing for two days.  Alex takes the case, and as she digs in, she finds a lead; an email reference to a meeting Mr. Brentwood had just before his disappearance at Club Tartarus.  Alex goes to the club, and before she knows it, she is investigating Greek gods.  What could possibly happen?

 Zeus, Inc. combines the hard-boiled private eye story with Greek mythology in a science-fictional setting.  The author did a good job blending the elements of Greek mythology into the classic private eye investigation.  Each of the characters had good voices, distinct from one another.  The plot moved along at a steady pace, with tension  building as the investigation runs into twists.  The pacing was okay and generally worked well, and the descriptions gave enough details to keep the story moving forward.  All this being said, I feel this story needed more work.  It just was a little too out there for me to really suspend disbelief and get into it.  There were repetitive and overly cutesy elements; it got old to hear Alex constantly referring to her car as, “the Phoebe”.  It felt like the author was trying a little too hard, and stretching just a little too far.  In the end, it was an okay story, but not an exceptional one.  I have not read any of this author’s work before.

Contains:  Swearing, Adult Situations, Sexual Situations

Reviewed by Aaron Fletcher

 

Posted on May 13, 2015 by , Reply

Help a Reader Out: Ghost Witch Seeks A Good Time

We have an interesting request from a reader :

I’m looking for story about a woman who has sex with a ghost of a man who was burned for being a witch.

 

Hard to say if this is a type of story the reader is looking for, or a particular one. It seems pretty specific to me, but maybe there are lots of these kinds of stories out there that I just don’t know about. But there is a series that comes immediately to mind, and that is the Rachel Morgan series by Kim Harrison. In this series, there is a character, Pierce,  a ghost of a man who was burned for being a witch,  who has a long and complicated relationship with Rachel (really, everyone in the series has a long and complicated relationship with Rachel, unless they get killed, and sometimes even that’s not enough).

There are two possibilities in the series. The first is a short story, ” Two Ghosts for Sister Rachel”,  the story in which 18-year old Rachel first meets Pierce. I haven’t read this, so I don’t know whether sex is actually involved, but in the books she refers to Pierce as the one against whom she has measured all other relationships,  and it’s a story rather than a novel, so maybe that’s it.

The other is the novel Black Magic Sanction. This is novel length, and as with most Rachel Morgan books, there are all kinds of craziness involving a rather large cast of characters, but it does feature Pierce and Rachel spending a night together.

 

As a side note, I have read the novels in the Rachel Morgan series, and Rachel drives me batty. But the world Harrison created is a really neat one, and the secondary characters are just great. There’s a good chance that urban fantasy readers will be hooked, at least for the first half of the series.

 

 

 

 

Posted on January 17, 2015 by , Reply

Book Review: Murder of Crows by Anne Bishop


 
Murder of Crows by Anne Bishop
 

Roc, 2014

ISBN-13: 9781101637944

Available: Hardcover, paperback,  Audible audiobook

 
 
Meg has earned her place with The Others by spending her own flesh and blood and gift of prophecy to save them. But tensions between The Others and humans are at an all time high, with the appearance of two new drugs that either sedate The Others beyond self-defense, or throw the humans into berserker rages against them. While Meg struggles with her need to use her potentially maiming power, and a chilling premonition about her new friends, Simon the werewolf and Vladimir of Clan Vampire are troubled by what they’re discovering about the traditions of the blood prophets.
 

With a blizzard coming in, pushed by the rage of the elementals at the battles they’re facing with the humans Bishop throws in a bit of snowed in impending disaster tension as well. A great read, well paced considering Bishop’s penchant for trilogies. Definitely recommended for collections and fantasy lovers.
 

Contains: violence, sexual violence, language

Reviewed by Michele Lee

Posted on January 10, 2015 by , Reply
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