Commentary and book review blog

First, thank you all for entering the contest! The following winners have been randomly choosen to win a copy of I Shall Not Want by Julia Spencer-Fleming. I hope you enjoy it and have enough enthusiasm about this series to want to share with fellow readers wherever they may congregate. IOW, spread the love. Ok here are the numbers and corresponding names: #9 (ArkansasCyndi), #20 (jmc), #25 (Li), #16 (Robin F).

Contest winners please contact me within (3) three days from today with your mailing address at avid book reader 36 at gmail.com (without spaces, of course). If I don’t hear back from you after three days, I will choose another contestant.

The Iron Hunt (2008) by Marjorie M. Liu is the first in a new series featuring demon hunter, Maxine Kiss. By day she has demonic spirits living on her body, making her immortal by providing their bodies for her armor and at night, they awake and peel away from her skin to be her bodyguards against the supernatural.

Maxine Kiss is by nature, a loner. A woman without family or roots. A woman trying to outrun her future. However, Maxine does decide to settle down in Seattle, with an ex-priest and man of faith, Grant Cooperon. He’s a flute-player who can see people’s auras and has the ability to change them into something good. He runs a homeless shelter where demons have inhabited the bodies of many of the residents. He experiments with them, using his flute-playing to change their souls.

Moving on. As the last line of women Wardens who were sent to protect mankind from the demons who have escaped the prison veil, Maxine is the last one of her kind. Her mother died when she was twenty-one. The story includes quite a few scattered scenes of Maxine’s mother and her life before she died. Maxine is well aware of her destiny. She knows that one day, she must pass down “the boys” as she refers to them, to her future generation one day. When that happens, an order for her death will be rendered and like her mother before her, she will die by the hand of her enemies.

The story starts off with the murder of a private investigator who was searching for someone who wasn’t supposed to be publicly known to anyone. At least that is what Maxine Kiss thought until she is questioned by the cops about her connection to the recently deceased private eye. She denies knowing him and decides to do a little detecting of her own to find out why he was searching for her. She is eventually led to an elderly gentleman, an anthropologist, who seems to have an interest in many disciplines and seems to have many secrets. The rest of the plot is somewhat hard to summarize but it involves real life folklore and myth, a bit of time-travel and the threat of the apocalypse at the hands of the supernatural.

I have absolute respect for an author who thinks outside the box but there are criticisms worth noting and discussing about The Iron Hunt. Let’s start with the narrative voice: it just didn’t flow well for me. Too many abrupt sentences and comma splices. True, I had experienced that writing style in the anthology but it wasn’t as bad (I thought) as it was in here. Second problem is the plot: too complicated, overblown, convoluted, complex, repetitive and ambiguous. Lastly, the characters failed to live up to their stated potentials. Maxine and her “boys” get shot at, ran over and sucker punched. For the armor that she has, it wasn’t very impressive. All the “boys” ever really did was eat inanimate objects and sing along to rock tunes while they remained idle for most of the book.

The bad guys, while entrenched in a convoluted plot that ran in circles, they managed to eek out some scary moments. Especially, Oturu, a demon made up of flesh and blood with feet made of knives who danced when he delivered a killing blow. No doubt this author has a vivid imagination with an interesting premise but I think it was poorly executed. The Iron Hunt was a disappointing read. There were a handful of scenes that were interesting but overall the book tanked for me. There is much about this plot that I have not discussed and will leave for you to discover on your own if you choose to read this book.

Honestly, after reading the anthology (that I hope you have read), I got what I expected. I was just hoping that Ms. Liu would surprise me with her different and unique story but she didn’t. As for the romance, I almost didn’t mention it because guess what? There really wasn’t much of one in here. Most of the romantic plot was wrapped up in the anthology so no sex, no romance, no chemistry and I still don’t much like the hero. My grade for The Iron Hunt is a D. Read at your own risk.

I didn’t get a chance to read and review The Spiderwick Chronicles and will save that for another day. So, I have come up with another topic that I hope will spark discussion: Where are They Now? There are certain authors whose work I’ve enjoyed in the past who now seem to have disappeared into obscurity. Many of these authors hit their stride in the late 80’s and 90’s and then vanished from the publishing world. What gives? Are they writing under another pen name that I don’t know about? Or have they unofficially retired? I mean what’s the deal?

I’ve come up with a list of authors who I used to read but who have disappeared. If you have any info to share about their current status in the publishing field, do drop me a line as I am curious to know if they are still writing. Also, this post gives me a chance to spotlight the books I’ve read and enjoyed that maybe some of you have never heard of before. A trip down memory lane. I haven’t reread them so I don’t know if I would enjoy these stories today. You’ve been warned.

First up is Katherine Sutcliffe. Despite my half-hearted search on the ‘net for her status as an author, I have nothing to report. I personally thought she wrote excellent romantic suspense novels. Her heroines oft proved to be controversial but she wrote with plenty of verve and atmosphere. My first Sutcliffe novel was actually a historical romance called Dream Fever. It’s been years since I read it but I remember the hero was tortured. She wrote a lot of historicals and was just getting started with romantic suspense and then - nothing. Ms. Sutcliffe’s last published work was Bad Moon Rising. She had another book that was due to come but it never saw the light of day.

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