Other Worlds

Other Worlds

by Barbara Michaels

Severely Edited Blurb:

In a London Club, Houdini, Conan Doyle, and other psychic investigators and debunkers gather to tell ghost stories. Their purpose is to tell the tale, and then each will pick it apart to try to find an explanation for the phenomenon in question. The first story is one of the most famous historical hauntings in U.S. history: the Bell Witch in Tennessee. The second is a moderately well-known haunting in Stratford, Connecticut, called, appropriately, the Stratford Haunting. Each tale is told, and then the guests gather around the club describe their understanding of whether the hauntings are either fake or very real.

My Reaction:

Well, the title (Other Worlds) certainly sounds like it could be creepy and interesting and typical of a Barbara Michaels gothic thriller.  The reality, unfortunately, is nothing like her usual tales.  I'm sorry, but I found it dry and dull.  I recognize the Bell Witch, so I don't expect a satisfying conclusion-- or indeed, anything from this retelling to be worth this slog... I just can't.  Not right now.  Maybe I'll pick it up again at a later date, but for now, it's a DNF!  I stopped 15% of the way through.  On to greener pastures! 

(Incidentally, this is the second DNF I have for this author.  With the other one, Smoke and Mirrors, I think I quit after the first page or two, because something annoyed me, I peeked at a few reviews, and I had my suspicions confirmed.  Political plot?  Heavy on the "Democrats are good, Republicans are evil"?  Oh, good grief!  No, thanks.  Life's too short.)

The Hunting Party

The Hunting Party

by Lucy Foley

Severely Edited Blurb:

A group of thirtysomething friends from Oxford meet to welcome in the New Year together, a tradition they began as students ten years ago. For this vacation, they’ve chosen an idyllic and isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands—the perfect place to get away and unwind by themselves.  However, after a decade, the weight of secret resentments has grown too heavy for the group’s tenuous nostalgia to bear.

By dawn on New Year's Day, a blizzard has shut the lodge off from the rest of the world-- and one of the group has been murdered.

Keep your friends close, the old adage goes. But just how close is too close?

My Reaction:
I always want to like this kind of book-- just mindless "thriller" entertainment-- but sometimes they disappoint, and it's rare that one is anything particularly special.  More often than not, they don't live up to expectations.  Characters do things that don't make sense, and frequently the characters themselves are all so horrible that I don't care what happens to them, one way or the other!  That was definitely the case with this one.  

I'm not sure what I think about the format of the book... It's a fairly large cast, and it took me a while to get all the characters straight in my head.  Then there's the fact that not only does the POV shift among a handful of characters from chapter to chapter, but we toggle back and forth in time between before and after the murder-- and yet we're not explicitly told/shown who the murder victim is until rather late in the novel.  By that point, I'd long since sussed out the identity of not only the victim, but also the murderer!

Everything was dragged out longer than it needed to be, and some "twists"/red herrings or minor mysteries about characters' backstories were needlessly, endlessly teased.  Practically everything that was supposed to be a surprise failed to do so.  More than a bit cliché and predictable.  

Maybe it's a nit-picky thing, but it drove me crazy when the author repeatedly used question marks incorrectly.  If it's not a question, it doesn't get a question mark!  Or have the rules of grammar and punctuation changed since the last time I took an English class?  Where was the editor? 

To top it all off, the epilogue hits you with something that makes no sense.  To avoid spoilers, let's just say that the murderer apparently doesn't even face trial for all of the crimes s/he committed in this book!  To be honest, I didn't initially notice that myself-- just reeling from the onslaught of cliché after cliché, really-- but after skimming a few other reviews, I saw it mentioned and realized that those reviewers were correct.  Very strange!  It's a huge, glaring error of that type that makes you question, again, what the editor was thinking.  

Meh.