This time around, Joanne gets to save the world from some very bad people who are trying to destroy the Djinn, the Wardens and, oh what the heck, how about the entire planet?  It turns out that one of her friends is one of the very bad people.  I didn’t see that one coming.

Ah… and despite some major opposition from Ashan, Joanne and David actually get married.

Ok, so now I just need to know when the next one is being published.

Actually, it’s typical Grisham.  If you like Grisham, you’ll probably like this one.  Oh, except for the ending.  That sucked.  I don’t really need fiction to reflect reality quite so perfectly.

One thing I admire about Grisham is his ability to create truly loathsome characters.  There were one or two in here I just wanted to rip off the pages and throttle.  These were well-balanced by the folks you’d want to socialize with, and the semi-clueless naif.

Yep, Grisham sure is good at characterizations.  But darn… is a happy ending too much to ask?

Bishop and his people work for the FBI hunting really bad guys.  The twist is that Bishop and his people are all psychic.  In some ways, this gives them an advantage over the bad guys.  There are clairvoyants who can see what’s going to happen and mediums who talk to the dead.  The telepaths certainly have an advantage in the communications department, especially where cell coverage is spotty.

But even with the advantages psychics have, they still need to do old fashioned police work… and that’s the fun part!  I like Hooper’s books… well, most of them.  She does write romance novels which aren’t as interesting to me as the detective novels.

The next book in this series comes out this month… and I’ll be searching for it.

I borrowed this book from a friend a couple of months ago (thanks, Kiran!) and finally finished reading it.  Although it might seem to be a dry, unreadable book from the length of time it took to finish it, that is completely not true.  (Life got in the way, darn it all!)

Kogen Mizuno one of Japan’s leading scholars of Buddhism, and he writes with an engaging and very readable style.  While there was very little in the book that I hadn’t already learned in my 16-week course, it was a delight to once again read about the origins of the Buddhist faith.  I highly recommend this book to anyone even the slightest bit interested in the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha.

Most of this is either common sense or I’ve heard it said in slightly different ways by therapists, friends who seem to have their lives put together, other authors, or the multitude of personal growth and development teachers I’ve encountered over the years.  That doesn’t make it a bad thing!  Sometimes you have to hear a thing a thousand times for you can say, “Oh!  I get it!”

The time of year for resolutions is swiftly approaching, and this would be a nice book to pick up if you just can’t stick to your resolutions.

I’m not sure exactly why, but I’m utterly delighted with Parker’s style of writing.  The dialog seems more real than many of the authors I’ve read lately.  Someone ought to tell other authors what Parker has discovered… real people don’t always talk in complete sentences.  No, seriously… they don’t.

In this book, we have a murder mystery.  I seem to read a lot of those.  There’s a dead girl… who is she?  Who killed her?  There are interesting interpersonal relationships… Jesse, our hero, still dates his ex-wife.  He dates other women, too.  He drinks too much, he plays softball, and he seems like a basically good guy.

In the end, the killer confesses after only a small amount of police intimidation.

I’ll be adding more of Parker’s books to my Booksfree queue.

What would you do if, after you died, you came back to live out a portion of your life all over again.  What if you did it again and again and again… except that every time you came back, you were a little bit older?  You know all of the history that happened your first time around, and you know exactly when you’re going to die.

What would you do?  What choices would you make the second or third or eighth time around?

That’s the idea behind Ken Grimwood’s novel.  It asks the age-old human question, “Why are we here?” in an entirely novel way.  And it certainly made me stop and think… if I could answer the question about choices I’d make the second and fourth and sixth times around, what’s stopping me from making those choices right here, right now?

I highly recommend this book!  Thanks, Stan!

Harry is back on the job, this time working in the Open-Unsolved division of LAPD.  He and his partner get a DNA hit on one of the open cases on his first day back.  And wouldn’t you know it… there’s high jingo involved!  There were cover-ups, and Harry’s old nemisis Deputy Chief Irving is somehow involved.

Even though the case has been open for 17 years, the detective work is top-notch.  It’s a fast-paced story, with enough twists and turns to keep you wondering just what happened back in 1988.

I think it’s fair to say I’m a fan of Michael Connelly and Harry Bosch.

They called him the Dollmaker — the serial killer who stalked Los Angeles and left a grisly calling card on the faces of his female victims.  With a single faultless shot, Detective Harry Bosch thought he had ended the city’s nightmare.

But then the dead man’s widow sues Harry and the LAPD for killing the wrong man — an accusation that rings terrifyingly true when a new victim is discovered with the Dollmaker’s macabre signature.

Now, for the second time, Harry must hunt down a death-dealer who is very much alive, before he strikes again.  It’s a blood-tracked quest that will take Harry from the hard edges of the LA night to the last place he ever wanted to go — the darkness of his own heart.

Well, it’s a little over the top, but the bottom line is that this new “Dollmaker” isn’t the guy Harry killed and is just following in the footsteps of the Dollmaker.  There are a few wrong guesses made by Harry (and me) about who the new killer is.  And darned if it doesn’t all make sense when everything is finally revealed at the end!

This book gets a thumbs up from me.

I’ve had this book for about a year now, and it’s never once made it to a shelf. It moves from place to place (the coffee table in the living room, the side table in my reading room, under my chair in my computer room, my backpack, or most frequenly my lap), never staying in any one spot for more than a few days.

I don’t get tired of looking at the fantastic work presented by a plethora of collage artists, and it’s certainly given me inspiration for some of my own work. In fact, I think there’s an idea starting to bubble up for all those spare CDs I have stuffed in boxes downstairs. Check my art blog to see what comes of it all.