Since I spoke to you last, I have read a couple more titles on my Kindle and found another book to go onto my 1001 Books list!
First up is Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith which is a new entry, number (67), on my 1001 Books And Authors You Need To Read Before You Die list!
Child 44 is a fictional account of serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo and follows the story of Leo Demidov, a MGB Agent in Russia's Secret Police, who discovers a link between a series of child murders and sets out to discover the culprit. The problem..... in Stalinist Russia, crime does not officially exist and Leo's investigation is an embarrassment both to the Government and to Stalin's perfect society! Leo is first transferred to a remote outpost and then hunted by his own colleagues as he refuses to let go of his investigation and finds himself questioning the very system he is a part of!
This is a highly engrossing read, a real roller coaster of a thriller and comes highly recommended! It is a shame then that its sequel, The Secret Speech, was such a disappointment by comparison! With a third book due out next year, I strongly believe this will prove to be the strongest book of the trilogy and that is why it makes the list!
Meanwhile back on Kindle, the F.Paul Wilson short story, Demonsong, proved to be very disappointing! The tale of how Glaken and Rasalom first met offered little in the way of new knowledge and left me with more questions than answers to the extent that I almost wished I had not read it! Likewise short story, The Butterfly Effect, was another let-down ~ telling the story of a dad who brings home some caterpillars in a container for his kids to watch progress into butterflies. Like the tales in M.J.Winn's short story anthology, this didn't really go anywhere and seemed to me to have little point to it!
The other full books that I have read on Kindle include the two concluding installments of Christopher Hunter's The Days And Months We Were First Born novella trilogy which brings his epic end-of-the-world story to a tidy and satisfying end! Though I actually had to pay for these, they were well worth the money and highly enjoyable! I do think they would work better as one complete tale rather than three separate novella but then that is not down to me and is at the author's discretion. Whatever......because for the amount that I paid for them, it was still cheaper than buying a tree-book!
I have also read Jenni Pox by J.L.Bryan which is a Carrie-clone telling the story of a young girl who is cursed with killing or making ill any living thing she touches skin-to-skin. Things get even more complicated for her when she discovers that she is not the only one in her town with abilities and that she is part of a much larger scheme of events! But though this story showed a lot of promise, the end result was very average and not at all everything it could've been! Though not awful, still this E-book managed to be more than a little of a disappointment and I would only download others in this series if they were free!
Finally, I have just started the classic Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I am not sure if I have read it before (I had a spate of reading the classics such as The Three Musketeers and Dickens when I was much younger) but fondly recall the film starring Douglas McClure with its awful, awful effects that consisted of sticking bits of cardboard to lizards then enlarging them on film to make them look like dinosaurs! Am really enjoying this at mo and have the two sequels on my Kindle also to read! Great vintage fun!
