Warning Light and other March reads

I finished 12 books in March:

Warning Light by David Ricciardi (ARC)
The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn (audiobook)
A Matter of Trust by Lis Wiehl (audiobook)
Ruin and Rising by Leigh Bardugo
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
Dead Watch by John Sandford (audiobook)
Joyland by Stephen King
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (audiobook)
Nice Try, Jane Sinner by Lianne Oelke
The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman (audiobook)
Heir of Fire by Sarah J. Maas
A Million Worlds With You by Claudia Gray

I received a copy of Warning Light by David Ricciardi from the publisher (Berkley/ Penguin Random House) in exchange for an honest review. Warning Light is scheduled for release on April 17, 2018.

Imagine this. You are on an international flight, perhaps for business, perhaps for vacation. Your plane begins to struggle, the pilot tells everyone that there is a minor engine issue and all is well. Then the pilot revises his statement. Your plane will be making an emergency landing due to complications with the minor engine issues.

Your plane lands safely. In the midst of Iran. Your plane is emptied into a deserted, earthquake damaged airport. You are pulled aside by airport staff and asked why you are in Iran, why you were taking pictures as you exited the plane. You insist that you are there by coincidence, just like everyone else on the plane, that you were taking pictures of the beautiful sunset.

But they don’t believe you. You are beaten. You are detained.

What do you do? More importantly, what should you do? What choices can you make that will keep you alive, that will get your back home?

This is how Warning Light starts. And I was all in.

I am hit or miss on spy/ political thrillers. Sometimes I struggle to get into the story. But that was not the case here. I was eager to continue reading, knowing that this type of book would be loaded with twists and turns that would keep the story moving.

And that was the problem. Far too soon in the story Warning Light had a plot twist that I feared was coming. One that I won’t reveal here, but it took the story directly into the land of the type of story I don’t usually enjoy. From there, Ricciardi continued to pile on the improbabilities and I found myself buying into the story less and less, caring about the main character less and less.

This is probably a novel that many people will enjoy, but it was not the novel for me. I would have enjoyed the story more if the novel had not turned so far from the path it started down in the first thirty pages.

Heels

Prompt from They Fight Crime!
He’s a scrappy devious gangster in drag. She’s a brilliant gold-digging mercenary on the trail of a serial killer.

“Now those are some killer shoes.”

I take a moment to appreciate my footwear before looking up. Rich purple bands twine across my feet, around my ankles and calves. Mirror-bright silver heels catch the pulsing light in the room, throwing it in a million directions. If I were to stand, they’d add three and a quarter inches to my meager sixty-four.

I force myself to look away, focus on the voice that spoke to me. I expected a man, a tough guy looking to pick me up. The voice was smooth, a deep rumble that cut through the whiny high-pitched squeal in the club.

Standing in front of me is a woman. Wearing a dress identical to my own. The dress I bought because it was a perfect match for my shoes. Swirls of purple, black, and silver. Barely there straps holding up a shifty, flirty tube of fabric.

I look again. She’s not a she. The voice didn’t lie. This is a man. In drag. In my dress. Admiring my shoes.

His hand reaches out to touch the shoe on the end of my angrily bouncing leg. He missed a detail. There is hair on the back of his hand, hair on his fingers. All the way up his arm, actually. A match for the dark locks he has smoothed behind one ear.

“Don’t touch.” I carefully shift my legs, tucking the shoes under my chair where they are safely out of his reach.

He retracts his hand as if I were a dog that had just nipped at his fingers.

I guess I kind of did.

“Sorry. They’re expensive. And fragile.” I flash him a smile and look over his shoulder. I can’t tell if we are attracting attention because we are two women in a bar or because we are a spectacle in a double-dress. I’m okay with the first. Not with the second. A double-dress spectacle could make it hard for me to get what I want tonight.

I find the eyes I am looking for. They are pointed in our direction, but don’t touch my dress-double. They are locked on me, skimming over my skin. I can almost feel them.

I look away before the body holding those eyes realizes I’m watching him. I focus on the man next to him, but ignore the center of my vision, widen my eyes to catch everything I can in the periphery.

The man I am after is under-dressed by the standards of his club. But he looks good, without a doubt. Jeans worn soft cling to his thighs. A tight blue T-shirt drapes the muscles of his abs under an unbuttoned flannel. Golden-blond hair waves over his forehead, skims over brows that slash above his steel blue-grey eyes. The T-shirt is deliberate, I decide. He’s playing up the storm in those eyes.

“Where’d you get them?”

I startle a bit. I’d forgotten about my not-even-close-to-a-twin standing in front of me. He’s also not a twin to the man I am after. My not-twin is skinny. The dress that kisses my curves hangs like a bag over his lack of muscle. His eyes and hair are dark, banishing the light that the golden man throws around the room.

Without me asking, dress-boy drops into the seat next to me. Apparently he doesn’t care if we make a spectacle. Maybe because he is a spectacle all by himself.

“I made them actually,” I respond as I shift to make sure golden-man can see me around dress-boy.

“Really! They are spectacular.” This guy is freakishly obsessed with my footwear.

But they are spectacular. I guess I shouldn’t hold it against him.

Before I can stop him, he has slid one fur-trimmed hand down my calf to lift my foot into the air. He tips his hand, shifting my leg like he is holding a glass of wine up to the light. No glass of wine is this pretty, this sparkly. We are both entranced for a moment, watching the light bounce and scatter.

We aren’t the only ones who see. I feel his eyes a moment before I look up and catch the golden man staring.

I extract my leg, careful to mind the heels. It wouldn’t do to cut my not-twin and give away the surprise. “It’s time for my shoes and I to get to work,” I say as I stand and move toward my prey.

February Reads

I finished 10 books in February:

The Magicians by Lev Grossman (audiobook)
The Wanted by Robert Crais (audiobook)
Y is for Yesterday by Sue Grafton
Foundations of Problem-based Learning by Maggi Savin-Baden and Claire Howell Major
Past Perfect by Danielle Steel (audiobook)
History is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera
Ten Thousand Skies Above You by Claudia Gray
Don’t Let Go by Harlan Coben (audiobook)
The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan (reread)
Bear is Broken by Lachlan Smith

Usually I talk about my favorite reads. Or something that struck me as a common theme in the books I read through the month. Or something that I learned as a writer from the books I read.

Maybe this falls into the last category. This month I am going to talk about my least favorite read. I’m not going to name it, because I have written books myself. I know how difficult it is to write a book, how much of you gets invested into the words you put on paper. For me, saying a book is bad feels like I am slapping the author. Typically I try to focus on what I did enjoy about a book. I might mention things that did not work for me as a reader, or things that I thought could have been better.

But this time, I am struggling to find the good things.

Because I struggled so much to find any enjoyment in this book, I decided to really try to figure out why. That’s when I realized the primary trouble for me was that this book contained no conflict. Zero. I spent hours in the car listening to this story, trying desperately to figure out what the quest was, what the characters wanted, what was standing in the way of achieving their goals. But I just couldn’t find any hint of conflict.

Even worse, I realized I couldn’t identify a protagonist. Maybe because there wasn’t a conflict. This book had a group of characters who stayed through the story, but none of them felt like they were at the center of the story.

Yes, books can work when they have several main characters, several people working toward their goals. The trouble for me was that none of the characters seemed to have a clear goal, need, or want in this novel. We were given a group of people who live together, getting along, being happy and successful throughout their blessed lives.

The end result was that I found the story boring.