Trick-or-Treat for Books! Death By Ice Cream

 

Trick-or-Treat Reads is a book-giveaway blog hop! Authors are giving away copies of their books--completely free. Consider it brain candy, if you will.

Death By Ice Cream for Halloween

The Ninja Librarian is giving away copies of the first Pismawallops PTA mystery, Death By Ice Cream, because what's better on Halloween than a spot of murder? But hurry--this is a one-day giveaway!

JJ MacGregor and her best friend Kitty Padgett struggle to hold the Pismawallops PTA together, and new volunteer Letitia LeMoine isn’t making it any easier. But when Letitia’s strangled corpse turns up where the ice cream bars should have been, things get a whole lot worse. JJ has to shoehorn in a search for the killer along with all her other problems: divorce, a 15-year-old son with his first girlfriend, a desperate race to complete the Yearbook on time, and her own tendency to get all wobbly-kneed around the Chief of Police. JJ just can’t help asking a few questions. But a loud mouth and insatiable curiosity can be a dangerous combination. Especially when someone wants her stopped.

Death By Ice Cream is a cozy mystery (light, no violence or bad language) for adults.

How to get your free copy:

To get your FREE copy of Death By Ice Cream this Halloween, go to Smashwords.com via this link and buy the book, using the coupon code BN35R. Your price should chance to $0.00. If it doesn't, check to see if you are too late--the price is only good until Nov. 1! Once you "buy" the book, you can download it in whatever format(s) you like.

And if you read it and like it...Death By Trombone will be on sale for just $1.99 with the coupon ZH24V through the end of November, so you can catch up on the series before Book #3, Death By Adverb, comes out at the end of the year!

Now hop on over and check out the other great book treats in the hop!

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Middle Grade Monday: Last Day on Mars

 

Title: Last Day on Mars (Chronicle of the Dark Star #1)
Author: Kevin Emerson
Publisher: Walden Pond Press, 2017. 326 pages, hardback.
Source: Library

Publisher's Summary: 
It is Earth year 2213—but, of course, there is no Earth anymore. Not since it was burned to a cinder by the sun, which has mysteriously begun the process of going supernova. The human race has fled to Mars, but this was only a temporary solution while we prepare for a second trip: a one-hundred-fifty-year journey to a distant star, our best guess at where we might find a new home.

Liam Saunders-Chang is one of the last humans left on Mars. The son of two scientists who have been racing against time to create technology vital to humanity’s survival, Liam, along with his friend Phoebe, will be on the very last starliner to depart before Mars, like Earth before it, is destroyed.

Or so he thinks. Because before this day is over, Liam and Phoebe will make a series of profound discoveries about the nature of time and space, and find out that the human race is just one of many in our universe locked in a desperate struggle for survival. 

My Review: 
In the beginning, this felt like just another middle-grade story of friends and testing their limits, only with a novel setting. Within three chapters, it was clear that it is a serious work of science fiction, and I was hooked. Liam and Phoebe have their moments of being very 13, and more interesting issues around, oddly, being rooted on Mars in a way that their parents never can be. After all, the kids were born there, and never knew the Earth that all their elders are mourning.

But issues of teen rebellion are soon lost in a high-speed,  high-stakes adventure, complete with some hot driving (Liam is sort of legal to be driving that skimmer drone, but who is left to care?). A couple of the scenes where he handles his drone (not  sure why it's called a drone, since it's manned) were a bit reminiscent of the original Star Wars movies, but not in a bad or particularly derivative way. Just a nod to one of the things we expect to see in a good space adventure.

It is often important in middle grade adventures to somehow get rid of the adults, so the kids can have real autonomy. This is done in Last Day on Mars in a convincing way, though the kids are left one sort-of adult. That helps ameliorate the other problem books with kid heroes doing big things often face: there's stuff that needs doing that they just can't realistically do, like calculate the course out of the solar system. That's taken care of here, and Liam and Phoebe are left to do what they do best, which is to think outside the box.

My Recommendation:
This is a very promising start to a promising SF series, and I recommend it for kids about 11 or 12 and up--there is a fair amount of real peril, and some parts that I think would just go over the heads of many younger kids, though there is no sex or language. My main caveat: while the immediate problems Liam and Phoebe face on Mars are tied up nicely in the end, the story is definitely not over, and I don't know when the next book is coming out (okay. I just check on Goodreads, and it is scheduled for release Feb. 13. That's not bad!). If you read this, you will definitely be waiting eagerly for the sequel.

FTC Disclosure: I checked Last Day on Mars out of my library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."  

Mystery Review: Burn, by Nevada Barr

 

Title: Burn

Author: Nevada Barr

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2010. 378 pages

Source: Library


Publisher's Summary:
Anna Pigeon, a Ranger with the National Park Service, is newly married but on administrative leave from her job as she recovers from the traumas of the past couple of months. While the physical wounds have healed, the emotional ones are still healing. With her new husband back at work, Anna decides to go and stay with an old friend from the Park Service, Geneva, who works as a singer at the New Orleans Jazz NHP. She isn't in town long before she crosses paths with a tenant of Geneva's, a creepy guy named Jordan. She discovers what seems to be an attempt to place a curse on her--a gruesomely killed pigeon marked with runic symbols; and begins to slowly find traces of very dark doings in the heart of post-Katrina New Orleans. Tied up in all of this is Jordan, who is not at all what he appears to be; a fugitive mother accused of killing her husband and daughters in a fire; and faint whispers of unpleasant goings-on in the heart of the slowly recovering city. Now it will take all of Anna's skills learned in the untamed outdoors to navigate the urban jungle in which she finds herself, to uncover the threads that connect these seemingly disparate people, and to rescue the most vulnerable of creatures from the most savage of animals.
 
My Review: 
I have been a fan of Nevada Barr and the Anna Pigeon mysteries for a long time, and there is no question that she is an excellent writer. I am, however, sorry that she has turned from the lighter touch of her early books to delve more and more into the darkest aspects of humanity. I get that murder is never a light-hearted thing. But I'm not sure that I want to see in my head the things that she has put there.

This makes my review a little hard, because part of me wishes I'd never read the book. At the same time, I do think that it is incredibly well-written, and that Barr has managed to weave a story that is compelling and rings true. Even the circumstances of Anna's presence in New Orleans feel right: I have long joked about Anna and a few other heroes of long-running series that I'm amazed that they can take such a beating in each book and keep bouncing back (in spite of what the blurb says, Anna isn't without physical reminders of her recent adventures, though the psychological scars are worse).

It does occur to me that this isn't really a mystery at all, in the classic sense (thus, no doubt, the "novel" designation on the cover). We know who has done the killing, though we don't know just how everything fits together, and in fact murder is not what drives Anna to risk her career and her recovery. It's something a lot worse, and therein lies the rub, since as I mention, I'm not sure I wanted to go there. But it's a testimony to Barr's writing that I couldn't put the book aside completely. Though I stopped two or three times in the first half, both because of other reading commitments and because I didn't want to go there, in the end, I went.




My Recommendation:
Fans of the series will probably be like me and want to keep going. But be aware that this isn't light, isn't the least bit cozy, and will take you places you may not want to go. Fans of the gritty thriller will be more at home.

FTC Disclosure: I checked Burn out of my library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."