Erin O'Riordan writes smart, whimsical erotica. Her erotic romance novel trilogy, Pagan Spirits, is now available. With her husband, she also writes crime novels. Visit her home page at ko-fi.com.
I love this alternative history world Chris Moriarty has created, a version of early 1900s New York City where magic is commonplace, but under the control of the police department's Inquisitor division. It's a world where tenement-dwellers clash with upper-crust families of ultrarich wizards, where Old World traditions collide with Industrial Age realities.
In this second installation, 13-year-old apprentice Sacha Kessler doesn't simply follow Inquisitor Max Wolf on the investigation of a mysterious death in full view of a packed theater. Sacha has some very adult decisions to make, including how much to trust Wolf and whether or not he wants to learn magic. Sacha's supernatural doppelganger is still on the loose, and the danger has never been greater.
Disclosure: I received this book at no cost from Amazon Vine in exchange for this review, which represents my own honest opinion.
This book will be released on May 28, but you can pre-order it now. In the meantime, catch up by reading The Inquisitor's Apprentice, the first book in a planned 5-part series.
I Am: Busy with my full-time online editing job, a new freelance job writing catalog descriptions (clothes and shoes, mostly, for a local store with a surprisingly large online reach) and ghost-writing some short stories.
I'm sneaking in as much reading time as I can, though. Here are a few updates on what I've read, am reading or have on the horizon.
I Have Read: Hemingway's Girl by Erika Robuck. 5 stars. I was not in any way disappointed with the second half of the book. It's a permanent keeper; I put it on the shelf next to The Old Man and the Sea.
I Want to Read: Call Me Zelda by Erika Robuck. I could have ordered it for free from Amazon Vine, but I didn't. I've got to read some things before I bring in any more.
Safe Word by Molly Weatherfield. Cleis Press sent me a review copy this week.
I Really, Really Want to Read: Lover at Last by J.R. Ward. A copy (from the library) sits on the table in front of me as I type. I'm going to let my mom read it first, though. She wants to finish it before she goes on vacation, because it will come due while she and my dad are out of state.
I'm Reading: Covet by J.R. Ward. I swear I will finish this book one of these days, but I still have about 74 pages to go. Maybe over the weekend.
'The Watcher in the Shadows,' freshly arrived in its Amazon Vine envelope
I also started The Watcher in the Shadows by Chris Moriarty. It's another Amazon Vine pick, and I really enjoyed the first book in the series. I'm usually reading two different books in two different parts of the house.
I Saw: Les Miserables. I swore I wasn't going to watch this opera unless there was a director's cut with Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe singing their parts naked. But I still put it in my Netflix DVD queue; I had to see what all the fuss was about. I assumed I'd be bored, but it was actually pretty good.
Add this to the list of I Saw the Movie, Didn't Read the Book. No, I don't want to read the book. I already have a dead French guy whose brick-like tome I adore; it is Alexandre Dumas and The Count of Monte Cristo. I must say non to Mr. Hugo.
I wasn't going to buy any more books for a while. In May, the Amazon Vine program is changing; currently, you have to write reviews of 80% of the items you've ordered to get another two items, but in May it'll be 100%. That means by the third Thursday in May, I'll have to have read three books:
Hemingway's Girl by Erika Robuck - I'm currently on page 25, and I've got to say the heroine, Mariella, is pretty hard not to love.
The Difference a Day Makes (Perfect, Indiana: Book Two) by Barbara Longley, the sequel to Far From Perfect
...so I'll be busy reading these, and also Covet by J.R. Ward. This is the second time I've tried to read her non-Black Dagger Brotherhood series, and I just couldn't get into it. It's actually pretty good - the main character, Jim Heron, seems to be a building contractor but actually has secret assassin skills gained from covert military ops. He's like Mr. Reese on Person of Interest, but instead of a reclusive billionaire boss he's now working for mysterious supernatural beings. His first "number" is Vin diPietro, a real estate mogul who, against his wishes, is also a medium who gets flashes of when people are going to die. In seven books, Jim will battle the seven deadly sins, starting with attempting to save Vin from greed.
Covet will also hold me over until I get my hands on the book I really want, Ward's Lover at Last. I'm gonna need Qhuinn and Blaylock to get their HEA - finally. (Sidenote: Thanks to this vampire/goddess article on SecretSun.blogspot.com, I remembered that the bisexual vampire played by Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger was named Miriam Blaylock. Did J.R. Ward name her gay vampire character after Miriam?)
"An Erotic Novel of the Count of Monte Cristo." Apparently it takes place after the end of the Dumas novel, and is about the Count and Mercedes - not the Count and Haydee. What happens to Haydee? I hope she doesn't make good on her statement that she'll die if the Count leaves her. I don't think it would be possible to exaggerate how badly I need to know what happens in this book - so I ordered it from Better World Books.
I read The Count of Monte Cristo in January. I desperately wanted the book to be longer. I read an abridged version, but even so, the ending left too many questions unanswered. Burning with questions, I read the modern sequel The Sultan of Monte Cristo by "Holy Ghost Writer." It was poorly written and unsatisfying for a huge number of reasons.
So please, Colette Gale, do not disappoint me.
Colette Gale sounds like a false name to me. Not just because Colette is a beautiful pen name in reference to the wonderful hell-raising 20th century French writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette who was known professionally only by her last name. (I learned the cooking term aspic from one of her short stories - but I digress.) Also because "Henry Gale" is the false name that Ben Linus initially gives the survivors on Lost - the name of Dorothy Gale's Kansas-bound uncle to go along with his Ozian tale of arriving on the island via hot air balloon. If the name "Colette Gale" is in tribute to both a beloved, prolific French author and the beloved, prolific U.S. author L. Frank Baum, then I expect a high quality of very imaginative and sensual work.
Oh, and as a nod to the title of this post, I now present for your amusement (I hope) "Call Me a Hole," a musical mash-up of the vocals from Nine Inch Nails' "Head Like a Hole" and the melody of Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe."
Robert Downey, Jr. is just a straight guy, and Adam Levine is a gay-friendly-but-straight cock tease, but Adam Lambert is an ACTUALLY GAY JEWISH GUY. He's the one who's not a designer; that's Nate Berkus, Michael Kors, and/or Marc Jacobs.
Adam Lambert is a rock star. He has legions of adoring fans, known as the Glamberts. This is my favorite Lambert tune:
His latest song is called "Better Than I Know Myself," but the album won't be out until March, and the official video doesn't seem to be out yet. You can listen to the audio, though.
In some alternative queer universe, as in my dreams, Adams Lambert and Levine are a married couple, I'm just sure of it. No doubt all their tattoos would match.
In this universe, Adam's boyfriend is a Finnish reality TV star named Sauli. They got in trouble the other night for a loud argument (according to some accounts, a physical fight) in a Finnish gay club called Don't Tell Mama. They were detained by police, though not booked or charged with anything.
But maybe it wasn't Adam who did those things. Maybe he has a dybbuk. I just finished reading Chris Moriarty's The Inquisitor's Apprentice, in which a young turn-of-the-19th-century New York Jewish man, Sacha, is bedeviled by a dybbuk set upon him by an alternate-history version of J.P. Morgan. One of the last scenes in the book takes place at the beginning of Hanukkah. Sacha's rabbi grandfather calls Hanukkah "not a real holiday," but it's still one of Sacha's favorites.
The Inquisitor's Apprentice is the first entry in what will be a five-part young adult series, but if you prefer books for grown-ups, you might like The Dyke and the Dybbuk by Ellen Galford, about a contemporary lesbian Jewish woman in London and her encounter with the supernatural. It was published in 1993, and I think it might be out of print now (and, for some reason, not yet published as an e-book), but you can still find copies floating around.
The Watcher in the Shadows by Chris Moriarty
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