The finale to the Legend series basically makes everyone sick.  It’s like a goddamn Victorian plague novel where everyone’s got f–king tuberculosis.   It’s just too big to fit into the last book, and it suffers because of it.  And then the ultimate ending feels like a cheat and then a double cheat.  John Green already wrote the book on teenage angsty illness romance.  Better luck next time.

Kathryn Dance may be a lesser spin-off of Deaver’s excellent Lincoln Rhyme series, but that doesn’t detract from Deaver pitching a good story.  From a serial killer who uses crowd panic to cause stampede murders, to a wave of hate crimes, to a task force fighting a drug pipeline from Mexico to LA to San Fran, there’s a lot of good threads woven here.  I figured everything out off the bat.  Only to discover the Deaver had totally bamboozled me in the best possible way. […]

The Laundry files takes on vampires.  Vampires are number two behind zombies on the “Oh, Goddammit, Come ON” list because everyone’s doing them and there are backlashes to the backlashes to the backlashes.  Somehow, Stross finds a mathemagical way to work the mythos, and it totally works. Not just that, but the repercussions through the story as a result are startling and devastating.  I’m even more eager for book six coming out in a few months.

The middle book in the Legend trilogy, we find Day and June embroiled in a plot to overthrow the Republic and assassinate the Elector.  Only all is not what it seems, and it looks like there’s some double dealing.  The Colonies of America are not quite the utopia they seemed as well.  But all of that world building kind of gets shoved aside so the two leads can make Edward/Bella eyes at each other.  And they get their love rhombus worked out. 

Golf.  Many people hate it.  I grew up with it, but without any discernible talent.  However, I love when pop culture events are put in the perspective of history, and this book has that in spades.  More than the four golfers, we learn their backgrounds, but also the larger history of golf and how the sport wasn’t always the money maker it is today.  The days when pro athletes weren’t ATMs.  Great stuff here for golf fans.

After all that jazz, after all that speechifying, essentially the power was there the whole time.  No grand destructions, no massive vengeance.  Just a lot of speeches and basically doing a deus ex Samsonite.  And while this is supposedly the end of The Sword of Truth, there’s actually one more book.  And by that I mean four more books.  Because Terry Goodkind’s theory is why say in one sentence or paragraph what you can draw out for four chapters?