Book: A Calm Before Storm #2

“Derrick Storm was a successful private investigator who occasionally consulted with the C.I.A., but when the opportunity for a life of leisure presented itself, he took it. Ignoring the disapproval of his father, Carl Storm, Derrick sold his company to the famed private investigator, Jake Palace, and moved onto his yacht.

But someone has different plans for the Storm men. When a decapitated head shows up on Derricks’ yacht with the Hindu sign for ‘life’ carved on its cheek, his father, Carl reveals that the mark is the calling card of the notorious criminal, The Fear. When Derrick recommends they inform the C.I.A., Carl refuses. This is about revenge.

Carl Storm is out to find the man who killed his wife.“

I must say, I really liked this issue of A Calm Before Storm. That said, nothing really happens. But the quips. And the action. It’s like one body of sequences lifted off a Castle episode. In comic form. Which, come to think of it, is also a bad thing.

Do we really want Castle in yet another media form? I mean, we already have the Nikki Heat novels that’s basically Castle in book form, and now we have the Derrick Storm graphic novels and comic books? Sure, Derrick doesn’t really have a Kate Beckett–but, he’s like a mixture of Kate and Castle! So they’re both still present–just in one person.

Which brings me to why I like the issue. With the introduction of Carl Storm, we get insight into Derrick’s history and character. And we take a step away from the similarities between him and Castle. Though, it does bring us a little closer to Beckett and her mom’s murder, there’s the added dynamic of a parent willing to spar verbally with his son. So it’s not completely the same.

I’m once again looking forward to the next issue of A Calm Before Storm. Hopefully, there will be new developments alongside the peek into Derrick’s back story by then.

Book: The House of Silk

“London, 1890. 221B Baker Street. A fine arts dealer named Edmund Carstairs visits Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson to beg for their help. He is being menaced by a strange man in a flat cap–a wanted criminal who seems to have followed him all the way from America. In the days that follow, Carstair’s home is robbed and his family is threatened. And then the first murder takes place.

The House of Silk brings Sherlock Holmes back wiht all the nuance, pacing, and almost superhuman powers of analysis and deduction that made him the world’s greatest detective, in a case depicting events too shocking, too monstrous, ever to appear in print…until now.“

The House of Silk is the first Sherlock Holmes novel I’ve read that isn’t written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; and while this is Anthony Horowitz’s best work (among his books I’ve read, I mean), it doesn’t really feel like an authentic Holmes novel.

Don’t get me wrong: Horowitz does get the time period right, and more importantly, he doesn’t deviate from the established characters of either Holmes or Watson–although, I must say his Watson is a lot more sentimental than what I remember from the stories I’ve already read.

What really sets The House of Silk apart as not a Doyle-written Sherlock Holmes novel is that it’s written for today’s readers.

I’m not saying that the original stories of Sherlock Holmes are slow-paced. They’re not. But neither were they written with the mindset that a reader can and will put a book down if they don’t find it engaging. Books today are written to be far more accessible, and thus, there is more competition.

The House of Silk is a fine novel, and author Horowitz makes a great attempt at emulating the voice of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But it is just that: an attempt. I think I would have enjoyed it more if the author had decided to give his own take on Sherlock Holmes–kind of like what Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss had done with their BBC drama series. Personally, I find the drama series more to my liking that the two blockbuster films featuring Robert Downey, Jr. because it’s more fresh and more interesting because of its new angle on the characters.

Then again, there’s the new Sherlock Holmes series Elementary that I feel took things too far. I love Lucy Liu, but John Watson should have stayed a guy. If they really wanted a strong female presence in the show, they could have chosen Mrs. Hudson (who is very bad-ass in her own way) or Irene Adler. But, I digress.

Going back to The House of Silk, it’s worth the price of the book and it is a fun read. But if you’ve already read a few of the original Sherlock Holmes novels, the challenge falls on not comparing this book to the ones Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote.

Reviews for Anthony Horowitz’s The House of Silk:
Visceral Observations
Rivers I Have Known
Vintage Frills
YouTube Review: Rawesome4815

Book: Heat Rises

“The bizarre murder of a parish priest at a New York bondage club opens Nikki Heat’s most thrilling and dangerous case so far, pitting her against New York’s most vicious drug lord, an arrogant CIA contractor, and a shadowy death squad out to gun her down. And that is just the tip of an iceberg that leads to a dark conspiracy reaching all the way to the highest levels of the NYPD.

But when she gets too close to the truth, Nikki finds herself disgraced, stripped of her badge, and out on her own as a target for killers, with nobody she can trust. Except maybe the one man in her life who’s not a cop: reporter Jameson Rook.

In the midst of New York’s coldest winter in a hundred years, there’s one thing Nikki is determined to prove: Heat Rises.“

My last post took almost a month to complete, mostly because of the time I needed to finish “editing” the accompanying video. I have no such excuses for this post, since I finished reading this early in January. And I can’t even say the book is hard to write about, since off the three Castle stories, this is the one that I really enjoyed reading. So let’s just chalk it up to laziness. And lack of time–but mostly laziness.

Now, before I start writing about the book, I just want to bring something up (maybe, again. I’m not sure if I already brought this up previously.) The synopsis for books are usually written to help sell the book, correct? And while, I remember writing about this part before, some amazing books are bogged down with really horrible synopsis, what’s the deal with synopsis that reveal a huge chunk of twists from the story? Let’s take this book for example. We start with a single case. A problem arises at the precinct, with regards to their captain. These two, so far, aren’t joined together by anything–and yet, we already know that they will be. Sure, readers who like to read between the lines would quickly spot the lead-in to the bigger picture. But because the synopsis has already spoiled the part where there’s a conspiracy that “reaches all the way to the highest levels of the NYPD“, the story suddenly stales. And it’s not until we get to the point when the connection the NYPD is pronounced that we start looking forward to what happens next again.

Readers are not like viewers, in my opinion. As a viewer, I like knowing secrets ahead of time–because this is a set-up, and a preparation, for the emotional journey that I will be undertaking with the protagonist. As a reader, I like my secrets forshadowed–not laid out in the open. Especially in mystery novels where you’re also testing your mind capacity in solving the crime before your protagonists do. Plot twists revealed in the synopsis only manages to bring down a reader’s enjoyment.

Now, moving on to the story itself, I have to say that whoever’s written this particular novel has a better handle on the characters. For one thing, they’re no longer a copy of the characters from the television show the novels are tied-in on. While they are still influenced by the actions of the characters in the show, they are no longer mirror images. Which I think is good because it doesn’t paint the titular television character in a good light that his characters are mainly mimicking the people in his life. The thing with tie-in content is that it needs to protect the show as well; they have to co-exist and help further develop the characters in their created world. I shudder now, remembering the horrible tie-ins to Charmed and Smallville.

As for the case presented in the story–it’s novel. It’s not reaching to connect the many inconsistencies presented in the case, and yet it manages to tie-up everything perfectly near the end. I also like how some characters were presented to be clear-cut villains, but end up being just… well, slimy and not completely evil. The pacing of the story is fast enough to keep you going, but not too fast that it loses you.

I’ve already mentioned it before, but I’ll write it here one more time: Heat Rises is the best off the Richard Castle novels.

Television: Sherlock Holmes, Series 2

I was planning on having a reaction post to each episode of Sherlock that was going to come out–similar to what I do for Doctor Who. Except, well, life got a bit too busy. So instead, I’m making one reaction post for the whole of Series 2–and a week late at that.

So, Series 1 ended with a cliffhanger: Moriarty has Sherlock and Watson cornered–and Sherlock’s about to do something desperate, namely shooting a vest strapped with bombs that would blow them all up to kingdom come. And how does this get resolved? By the Bee Gees. Music really does have a way of saving souls. Cop out or not, the resulting pardon Moriarty gives our heroes does set up his character nicely. Our main villain is unpredictable–and this pretty much sums up the three episodes of Sherlock Series 2. Unpredictable.\

A Scandal in Belgravia. One of the most popular characters in the Sherlock stories is The Woman: Irene Adler. She’s almost always appeared as a love interest for our titular hero–except in the original (and only) story she appears in: A Scandal in Bohemia. Miss Adler is set up as the only woman to have ever outwitted Sherlock, and somehow this was translated into him having feelings for her. Though it is alluded to, it was never verbalized out right.

With that said, I applaud the team of Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss for being able to flesh out the closest adaptation to the real Irene Adler with their version of The Woman. She’s smart, she’s wicked–and she’s in it for herself. That was the Irene Adler we meet in A Scandal in Bohemia–and it’s the same Adler we meet in A Scandal in Belgravia. Well, except the modern version is more independent off men.

The way Moffat wrote Sherlock’s admiration for The Woman was admirable in itself. There are allusions to how other adaptations have presented Adler, as a love interest; there’s a slight wink at the Sherlock fandom (at least that’s how I read it) while alluding to the relationship between Sherlock and Watson; and the story is tweaked in such a way that a short story transformed into a full-length feature with ties to the end game. Moffat’s inclusion of Moriarty in the story serves to give the character of Adler more backstory–while, at the same time, letting Moriarty grow more as a formidable foe.

So however you felt about the resolution to the Series 1 cliffhanger, the main story of A Scandal in Belgravia will surely turn you into a believer again.

And then we come to: The Hounds of Baskerville.

I read the novel that spawned the adaptation–and I’ve given my two cents worth on what I thought about the story and how it was told. I’m happy to say that the modernized version lives up to the original story–and exceeds expectations. Unfortunately, coming from the astounding first episode, it does fall a little bit flat.

Mark Gatiss, who wrote the episode, really knows how to do horror. Creeping the hell out of you, and yet keeping you glued to your seats. But it’s the science of things that killed the thrill of this episode, I think. Which is a shame, because guest star Russel Tovey was amazing as the troubled Henry, the guy who hires Sherlock to investigate the death of his dad–that happened more than a decade ago.

Unlike the novel, where Sherlock was absent from the picture for the better half, the television adaptation has Sherlock very active in the case. A bit too active though, in my opinion. Just like the novel, there was certain disjoint in how Sherlock was in the first episode, and the last episode, compared to how he was shown here. Or maybe I just can’t get over the oddness of how the post-production staff (and the director) thought Sherlock’s “mind palace” worked. It just seemed very awkward and unnatural, in my opinion. And I still can’t enjoy the episode fully because that scene, with Benedict Cumberbatch twitching and shrugging and playing with thin air, continues to bother me.

The Reichenbach Fall. Of the three episodes, this is the only Sherlock story that I wasn’t familiar with. Based on The Final Problem, in which author Arthur Conan Doyle decided to kill Sherlock, I came in knowing that I would be crying buckets of tears–or, at the least, I’d be very close to crying by the end of the peisode. After all, if there’s one thing I learned from Steven Moffat’s time in Doctor Who, it’s this: Moffat is amazing as a horror writer–but he is ruthless when it comes to tear-jerking scenes. Then again, he wasn’t the one who wrote the episode. But this was supposed to be the end. And in a way, even though the series has already been picked up for Series 3, the episode was the end.

This episode served as a culmination of everything that happened from A Study in Pink onwards–especially with regards to Moriarty as a villain. Because, like Irene Adler, Moriarty only appeared once in the original Sherlock stories–and his only purpose was to be the cause of Sherlock’s death. The team behind the drama series managed to fully flesh him out, and turn him into one truly frightening villain whom you can see actually defeating Sherlock. And with that, they’ve truly made BBC’s Sherlock as the adaptation to end all adaptations.

You can’t get any better than this.

Book: The Face on the Milk Carton

“No one ever really paid close attention to the faces of the missing children on the milk cartons. But as Janie Johnson glances at the face of the ordinary little girl with her hair in tight pigtails, wearing a dress with a narrow white collar—a three-year-old who had been kidnapped twelve years before from a shopping mall in New Jersey—she felt overcome with shock. She recognized the little girl—it was she. How could it possibly be true?

Janie can’t believe that her loving parents kidnapped her, but as she begins to piece things together, nothing makes sense. Something is terribly wrong. Are Mr. and Mrs. Johnson really her parents? And if not, who is Janie Johnson, and what really happened?“

Sometimes, I ask myself, what makes me like a book? I have, long ago, nixed the idea that a beautiful cover would get me to buy a book. Sure, a nice cover still lures me in—but I pay more attention to the back cover: where the text is. And since I started paying for my own books around a decade ago, I’ve been very picky about the books I buy.

So what made me buy The Face on the Milk Carton?

Reading the back cover, I have to admit that I was intrigued about the concept of a missing child photo being recognized by the missing child herself. And then, reading the author’s introduction, I started to get into the story: what do we know about the missing? What happened before and after they were taken? Before or after they went missing? It’s a treasure trove of stories, each one different from the other. And author Caroline B. Cooney has a very interesting story to tell.

I didn’t know The Face on the Milk Carton was the first of four books when I bought it. This means I’m going on another quest for books that’s probably going to take me forever to find. But that’s all right, because I fell in love with the world that Caroline Cooney made in the Janie books.

We get a conflicted main character in Janie Johnson, and while I understood what she was going through, agreeing with her actions was a different matter. My mind knew that her problem, of having two set of parents, one who might have kidnapped her when she was a child, was very tricky. Especially since the parents she did grew up with loved her. Deeply. And she loved them too. Her story wouldn’t be as easy as trading one set of parents with another. If it was, there wouldn’t be a book—much less, four.

But reading through Janie’s story, I found myself remembering childhood days when I thought I was adopted. Back then, I looked nothing like my parents and I acted nothing like anyone in our large family. Growing up, I was an outcast from my own family. I didn’t share anyone else’s interests. The sport I liked to watch was football—not the basketball my male cousins love to play; and my head has always been stuck in storytelling mode. I never showed interest in the family business of electronics, or the male side’s joy in procuring as many girlfriends at one time. I didn’t even have the business-savvies that my sisters had.

As a kid, these things were enough to make me think that I was adopted. As a child, I’ve always wondered what my real parents were like: if they were nicer than the ones I had, or if they were stricter; and I’ve wondered what I would do, had they decided to take me back. Of course, I’ve since accepted that these thoughts were just flights of fancy. I was different because I was brought up different. It had nothing to do with genetics at all.

But it was a memory to go back to while reading The Face on the Milk Carton. That was enough to give me a sense of what the main character, Janie, was going through. How do you turn your back against the people who raised you, and loved you? And the answer is, you don’t.

Still, if you knew that you real parents are alive and worried about you—have been worrying about you for the past twelve years—can you just ignore them, and try to live as if they never existed?

If you had been in Janie’s shoes—what would you do?

I’ll reserve my reaction to the story until after I’ve found and read all the Janie books. But if you’re already looking for reviews and recommendations, here are a few I found online:
Reeder Reads
Teen Space
Book Journey