More quickies

It's not even that I'm too lazy to post more here these days, it's just that I'm too tired.  If you check out my other blog, you'll see that Mr. Mouse and I have been keeping very active and thus I've found myself far more wiped out in the evenings than I was when we were in Maine - which was when I used to do most of my writing.  Here, after a day of hiking and drinking beer, and/or skiing and drinking beer, and/or even yardwork* and drinking beer, all in the glorious Utah sunshine, I'm just beat.  I'm way behind on a DVD review I need to do and yet when I can't stay awake to watch, I can't really write an honest review, can I? 

Anyhoodle, I did manage to knock off these two books lately, in addition to that Stephen King behemoth:

A Suitable Vengeance - Elizabeth George. This is #4 in the Inspector Lynley series.  It's out of the timeline of the first three, going back into the pasts and personal lives of Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, his fiancee Deborah, his estranged chum Simon St. James (who in the "current" timeline is married to said Deborah) and St. James's former lover, Lady Helen (after whom Lynley is pining most desperately in the current timeline). It's all very twisted and strange, the relationships these people have with one another.  Luckily there are a couple of murders to be solved to distract everyone from the sordid affairs of the heart:  the editor of the local paper of the village in which Lynley's family's summer home is found brutally bludgeoned to death and then, later, St. James's fashion model sister's boyfriend falls to his death from a cliff.  I didn't think this volume was as strong as the first three books because of its focus on the main characters' personal lives.  I suspect this may have been a slight sop to the fans of the series who probably wished to know how everyone got to where they are - I just didn't find it as interesting.

Every Last Drop - Charlie Huston. I also didn't find the fourth of Huston's hard-boiled noir vampire Joe Pitt Casebooks series as interesting.  Oh, Joe is in more trouble than he's ever been before, banished to the Bronx, with all the Manhattan Clans poised to take his head off should he come back to the island, Joe is all alone.  Evie is sequestered in the Enclave, and all his former allies are now enemies.  So when the Coalition offers him a way back to Manhattan for a small job - infiltrating a newly rising Clan as a mole - Joe takes it.  Of course, along the way some of those enemies take a few pieces of Joe.  When during the course of his infiltration, he discovers the most heartbreaking and horrifying secret yet, learning that there are more levels to the hell he lives in than he ever imagined.  This one just had too much going on and was clearly written as a set-up for the next (and I believe, final) book.  It's very busy and although the secret Joe stumbles onto is a huge and impactful revelation, there's no resolution.  The other books could be read as stand-alones if necessary; not so Every Last Drop.