Thursday, February 15, 2018

The Black Echo



The Black Echo is the first novel in the Harry Bosch series by Michael Connelly. Harry Bosch is a homicide detective in the Hollywood division of the Los Angeles Police Department. He gets a call on a Sunday morning about a dead body on a pipe on the Mulholland Dam. Since he’s on-call, Harry needs to respond to the call which most of the people responding believe to be a a junkie overdosing on heroine. Harry thinks things looks suspicious. After they get the body out of the pipe and bout to put it into the coroner’s van, Harry gets a good look at the face and recognizes the victim as a person that he served with in the Vietnam War twenty years before that. After that, Harry vows to set out to find what actually happened.

This is a good story, but some the reader may be able to predict some of the events well ahead of time. With that said, there are many twists and humorous spots in the story. The book is very enjoyable.

If interested in reading this book, you can purchase it in various formats from the following sites:



World of Sleuths Rating: ****
(Four out of five stars)


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Friday, February 9, 2018

March Mystery Madness 2018 Announcement




March Mystery Madness is a month long readathon of mysteries and thrillers on Booktube (the book community on YouTube), GoodReads and Twitter. It was started two years ago by Elizabeth, channel name LizziefayeLovesBooks, and Troi, of Troi Towel, both small channels. Last year they added Di, Disis19 Hearts, another small channel, as another co-host and they also created the Goodreads group Mystery Madness where readers could participate along with on Booktube. They also did activities on twitter.

I had started my Booktube channel shortly less than a month before the event began last year and participated in it. There were seven challenges in it last year, designed at specific mysteries, more towards cozy mysteries. I adapted them more to what I was comfortable with reading which is thrillers .

This year, it was decided to invite more people to host the readathon, which include me, whose mystery preferences range from romantic suspense to cozy mystery, hard-boiled mysteries and various types of thrillers. There are nineteen hosts and three guest hosts this year. Most of the hosts have Booktube channels, some big and some small, like me. There are some of us that have blogs that we are using to spread word of the event this year. 

When working on planning the challenges for this year's readathon, it was generally agreed upon not to target any specific type of mystery in our challenges. We came up with six one-word challenges that can be interpreted by the participants how they see fit. Those challenges are:

1.  Shelf - This could be a mystery or thriller from you physical book shelf, ereader shelf, Goodreads          shelf, library shelf, etc.
2.  Borrow - This could be a book borrowed from the library, a friend, Hoopla, CloudLibrary,  
         Kindle Unlimited, etc.
3.  New - This could be a mystery or thriller that's a debut novel, a new to you author, a new novel by          an author, etc.
4.  Historical - This can be a classic mystery such as Sherlock Holmes or something by Agatha 
         Christie or a mystery or thriller that's written by a modern author that takes place sometime in  
         history.
5.  Foreign - This one can be a translated mystery or thriller or one that takes place in a country other
        than where you live, etc.
6.  Opposite - This one can be from a mystery or thriller sub-genre that you never read or a par of
        mysteries that are polar opposites.

The hosts are posting their announcement videos today on Booktube. Here is a link to my video:  March Mystery Madness Announcement

Whenever I post a new video for March Mystery Madness, I will post a new corresponding post here in this blog and include a link to the video.

Below are the links for the channels for all of the hosts for this year's March Mystery Madness. I encourage you to visit all of their channels. We will all be posting mystery related videos from now through the end of march.

Hosts for #MarchMysteryMadness 2018: 
Subscribe to see all their mystery related videos during March!
Mike and Becca from Books and Looks
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCID9ka5z39t_0wE0h4PloQw

Mara from bookslikewhoa
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzfZdP0V5wRtO3xR79nAS2A
Courtny from Courtagonist
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGli6OijbAYLXxGGrcU7HZg
Di from Disis19 Hearts (hosting for her 2nd year)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUivQ7uYwojmtr8pQj75S-A
Emily of Emily Sears
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC10eg9LiUkB1U5pDQzYpG8g

Catherine from Jayne Catherine on Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6FLwH_JclBvP3za2X9k9MA

Kay of Kay T
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqWD_kolwsDNOjc3FPlN7Zg

Kady  @lilkadykitty on Twitter will be hosting Twitter sprints
Elizabeth from LizziefayeLovesBooks (co-creator)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCA5YIIIh2MQ9wFrMXazPn1g 
Laura from mom2triplets04
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTD2t_Jo0lrlrT-7DSzvanQ

Sarah from Not Just Romance Novels
Jen of Remembered Reads
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpslOZdjsglmXfq1AfPJ2dA

Jo of Retired Book Nerd
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEHdvdxilEkeGvVg_Q6Kp3w

Steve of Steve Donoghue
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1B9FfvVLRt8s6scUa79oag

Stephanie from Time to Read
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdIj2DwiU-UtuS2Ef-MIIHA 
Tim of World of Sleuths
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_6HnShtKqQySiYKAC5ORpw

Guest hosts:

Troi of Troi Towel (co-creator)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDXuAdVsxAgVIpuqcIZrOpw

The Goodreads group Mystery Madness can be found at  https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/184109-mystery-madness

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Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Red Storm Rising



Red Storm Rising was the second book written by Tom Clancy, co-written by Larry Bond, and is a standalone novel. It was published in 1986 while the Cold War as still going on. Muslim extremists attack an a large oil refinery and the adjacent oil fields in the Soviet Union, setting them on fire and causing an oil shortage in the Soviet Union which would last at least a few years. Because of that, the Soviet leaders decide that they are going to forcibly take an oil field in the Middle East, but before the can do that, they need to prevent NATO from getting in their way. The only way they know of doing that is by dissolving the NATO alliance by starting a war bin Europe and blaming it on Germany. But does their plan work?

This is a well crafted technothriller with plenty of action. It follows characters in the United States, Iceland, England, Scotland, Belgium, and the Soviet Union and has plenty of action on land, in the air and at sea.

If interested in reading this book, you can purchase it in various formats at the following sites:



World of Sleuths Rating: *****
(Five out of five stars)


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Monday, January 22, 2018

Duplicity



Duplicity is the first political thriller in the Brooke Grant series by Newt Gingrich and Pete Earley. Brooke Grant is a female African-American captain in the U.S. Marine Corps. While serving at the U.S. embassy in London, see sees a suspicious looking character approaching the U.S. Embassy in London carrying a suitcase. After alerting a London police officer, she tackles the suspect and prevents him from setting off a bomb in from of the embassy and gains Brooke popularity in the news in the United States. Meanwhile in the U.S., it is an election year where the incumbent president has stiff competition from a wealthy billionaire that bought his way into the Florida and is trying to do the same thing with the presidential seat with an isolationist platform. To counter it and to win votes, the president decides to open an embassy in Somalia with a vow to help them fight terrorism and assigns Brooke as the military attaché. Just after the newly ambassador arrives to the new embassy, terrorists overrun the embassy, taking everybody, but Brooke hostage who escapes in a disguise. Brook then sets out to free the hostages.

This book is surprisingly good! It was first published in 2015 and has some similarities to the last U.S. Presidential election and even some of the events that currently making the new in the U.S. It is an excellent piece of fiction from the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives!

If interested in reading this book, you can purchase it at the following sites in various formats:



World of Sleuths Rating: *****
(Five out of five stars)


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Thursday, January 4, 2018

Along Came a Spider



Along Came a Spider is the first novel in the Alex Cross series by James Patterson. Alex Cross is an African-American psychologist turned Washington, D.C. homicide detective that is called, at the request of the mayor, to assist on the case of the kidnapping of the third grade girl, daughter of a famous actress, along with her best friend and classmate, son of the Secretary of the Treasury, from an affluent private school in Washington, D.C. by a teacher at the school. It turns out that there’s a lot more than meets the eye about the teacher and the kidnapping.

This book has plenty of action throughout the entire story. It show how different agencies mistrust each other even when they’re supposed to be working with each other. Like in most cases, the book is a lot different and much better than the movie with the same title.

World of Sleuths Rating: ****
(Four out of five stars)


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Sunday, November 26, 2017

Lines of Justice: Azdaja

I received a review copy of this book of this book from the author, Lee Sherred, in return of an honest review.

Lines of Justice: Azdaja is the debut novel by Lee Sherred. The story follows Dean Sampson, while serving in the Royal Military Police (and formerly having served in a parachute regiment) with United Nations troops in Kosovo in 1999, his team comes across a room in a basement in a town where a Serbian policeman and his family were gruesomely tortured and murdered which made everybody on the team sick by what they saw. All of a sudden they saw some movement in a dark corner of the room and captured the guy that did these atrocities, but they couldn’t prove it and he was sent back to Serbia. Now in present day England, Samson is a policeman and the body of one of the members of his team is found tortured in the same manner. Samson sets out to find and eliminate this man.

There is some very descriptive violence in this book. Other than the descriptive violence, the book is pretty good. The author ties in his military and police background into this book with non-stop action. This is the first book in a series and I’m waiting for the next one.


World of Sleuths Rating: ****
(Four out of five stars)




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Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Into a Raging Blaze


Into a Raging Blaze is the debut novel by Swedish author Andreas Norman and was translated to English by Ian Giles. The book is about Carina Dymek, a Swedish diplomat who while at a regular working meeting with the European Commission, is approached by a man that gives her an USB stick. When she gets back to Sweden at discovers that it has a proposed top secret European Union Document, she forwards it to the Swedish government officials that would be the most appropriate to handle this material. The next thing she knows, Carina is suspended from her job, an investigation is began and her life starts going in a downward spiral. She decides the only way to repair her reputation to get her reputation and get her job back is to find this man that gave her the USB stick.

This book tends to be a slow read, especially at the beginning. The author doesn’t depict Americans and British in the best of light. It does start getting better within the last one hundred pages or so.

If interested in reading this book, you can purchase it in various formats from the following sites:



World of Sleuths Rating: ***
(Three out of five stars)


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