Mystery/Thriller: Antonello Fiore's 'Killer Rumors'

Killer Rumors by Antonello Fiore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For Philadelphia detective Frank Rinelli, life is good. He's got a loving relationship with his sister, her husband, and their lovely daughters. His work partner is Nick Lorenzzo, who happens to have been Frank's best friend since they were schoolboys. But even seasoned detective Frank is rattled when he's called upon to solve the vicious murders of two beloved Catholic priests, found with strange clues on their bodies. The priests are not the only ones to fall victim to what appears to be the evil work of two men. The detectives quickly hit upon a suspect: Tom Branchard, a defrocked former Catholic priest who fell from grace when he was convicted of horrendous crimes against his parish's young children. But what was the connection between Branchard and the two priests found murdered? And who will be the next victim?

This briskly-paced crime thriller has enough action and surprising twists to keep the reader guessing. I'm not a high-volume reader of the mystery/thriller genre, but when I do read one, I expect certain elements, including a protagonist who's likable and competent, but not a cartoonish superhero type, and Frank Rinelli is that.

By the way, if this series ever becomes a movie or a TV series, I want David Valcin from Person of Interest to play Frank.



Frank, as a narrator, is not vain enough to say, "Hey, I'm really good-looking," but you just know that he is. This novel delivers all the elements I would expect, but contains enough surprises to avoid becoming a paint-by-numbers police procedural.

Another thing this novel does really well is give us just enough of a glimpse inside the villain's head to make his motivation believable. In this case, there are two antagonists with two very different motivations - and then there's a shocker of a twist that connects them. I won't say anything else about the plot to avoid giving away any spoilers.

If you don't mind some intense action and a few gruesome crime scenes, and you're looking for a page-flipper to occupy an afternoon, give this one a chance. Do be aware that, while nothing explicit is described in the novel, mention is made of the abuse of young children, and sensitive readers may find that aspect of the story disturbing.

I received a copy of this book from the author at no cost in exchange for an honest review.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

#FridaysReads 'Fangirl' and 'The Lost Sun'

I'm currently reading Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl and loving it! The synopsis from Goodreads:

"From the author of the New York Times bestseller Eleanor and Park.

"A coming-of-age tale of fan fiction, family and first love. 

"Cath is a Simon Snow fan.

"Okay, the whole world is a Simon Snow fan . . .

"But for Cath, being a fan is her life — and she’s really good at it. She and her twin sister, Wren, ensconced themselves in the Simon Snow series when they were just kids; it’s what got them through their mother leaving.

"Reading. Rereading. Hanging out in Simon Snow forums, writing Simon Snow fan fiction, dressing up like the characters for every movie premiere.

"Cath’s sister has mostly grown away from fandom, but Cath can’t let go. She doesn’t want to.

"Now that they’re going to college, Wren has told Cath she doesn’t want to be roommates. Cath is on her own, completely outside of her comfort zone. She’s got a surly roommate with a charming, always-around boyfriend, a fiction-writing professor who thinks fan fiction is the end of the civilized world, a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words . . . And she can’t stop worrying about her dad, who’s loving and fragile and has never really been alone.

"For Cath, the question is: Can she do this?

"Can she make it without Wren holding her hand? Is she ready to start living her own life? Writing her own stories?

"And does she even want to move on if it means leaving Simon Snow behind?"

Simon Snow, for those who don't know, is a fictionalized version of Harry Potter. (A fictionalized version of a fictional character? It's kind of meta, but that's what it is.) Cath and Wren are well-know in the Simon Snow fandom as the co-writers of an ongoing romance series between Simon and his roommate Baz. Baz is, essentially, Draco Malfoy. Essentially, Cath ships Drarry - really, really hard. If you've ever been in a fandom and you're familiar with fanfics and shipping, you'll probably find this book highly amusing. 

If you find it highly amusing that there are people who get into fandoms and know terms like fanfics and shipping, you'll probably find this book highly amusing. 

Cath and Wren are from Omaha, Nebraska. 

I'm also about 100 pages into The Lost Sun by Tessa Gratton. Its Goodreads synopsis:

"Fans of Neil Gaiman's American Gods and Holly Black's The Curse Workers will embrace this richly drawn, Norse-mythology-infused alternate world: the United States of Asgard. Seventeen-year-old Soren Bearskin is trying to escape the past. His father, a famed warrior, lost himself to the battle-frenzy and killed thirteen innocent people. Soren cannot deny that berserking is in his blood--the fevers, insomnia, and occasional feelings of uncontrollable rage haunt him. So he tries to remain calm and detached from everyone at Sanctus Sigurd's Academy. But that's hard to do when a popular, beautiful girl like Astrid Glyn tells Soren she dreams of him. That's not all Astrid dreams of--the daughter of a renowned prophetess, Astrid is coming into her own inherited abilities. 

"When Baldur, son of Odin and one of the most popular gods in the country, goes missing, Astrid sees where he is and convinces Soren to join her on a road trip that will take them to find not only a lost god, but also who they are beyond the legacy of their parents and everything they've been told they have to be."

Gratton has written this book in a fairly brilliant way. It's set in a contemporary, familiar world (the 21st century U.S.A.), using familiar modern language, yet there's just enough Norse mythology and Germanic folkways to make it resonate with the time-honored sagas of the English language and its cultural ancestors (think Beowulf). Gratton is a scholar of Old English, but this novel is in the voice of a modern teenager. 

I don't think I'm explaining it well, but it's really well done. 

Heather at Blonde, Undercover Blonde had a good idea today: to link to all the reviews she's done so far in 2013. I don't want to link to every single one, but here's one for every month:

January - The Count of Monte Cristo
February - Cora: The Unwilling Queen
March - The Art of Disappearing
April - Hemingway's Girl
May - Lover At Last
June - In the Body of the World
July - Divergent
August - Insurgent
September - Finding Esta
October - Princesses Behaving Badly

Joss Whedon's 'Much Ado About Nothing' - A Non-Whedonite's Take

I've been looking forward to watching this movie for a long time. I love Shakespeare, and although I've never read the entire text of Much Ado About Nothing, I'm somewhat familiar with the play from the 1993 film version, starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson as Benedick and Beatrice.



I'm not a fan of Joss Whedon per se. I have no reason not to like him, I just never watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, or any of his other series. Buffy was my mom's show; she never missed it. I can honestly say I never watched a single episode, but not because I was against it for some reason. I just liked other things at the time it was popular, and I've never felt any particular urge to watch it.

I have seen The Avengers three or four times now - I'm quite fond of it - and I did start watching this fall's new Agents of SHIELD show.

The person I am a fan of is Amy Acker. If you're not watching Season 3 of Person of Interest, you should be. (If you're missing it on Tuesday nights, you can catch up on iTunes.) Her character Root is really stealing the show this season as she calmly but creepily talks about her relationship with The Machine to her therapist.



Acker is a slim, dainty woman - very elegant and beautiful - and when she gets in character, she looks like a ballerina with murder eyes. I hated Root at first. (I'm overprotective of Harold Finch.) Then I saw how interesting she was. Now, while I still think her character does a lot of bad things, I like Root, and I'm protective of her, too.

(Cf. the character Rebekah on The Vampire Diaries and The Originals, whom I started off hating but ended up liking and respecting probably more than any other female character in the series.)

"Root" as Beatrice? That had to be interesting.

The DVD came out on Tuesday the 8th, and I got it from Netflix today. I watched it almost immediately. I'm going to watch it at least once more before it goes back - I loaded the Shakespearean text (this one - 99 cents!) into my Nook so I can read along.

It was everything I hoped it would be. It's a beautiful movie - visually striking (filmed entirely in black and white), true to Shakespeare's intentions (a dark comedy with moments of joy, and a lot of double entendres), yet fresh and original. Not only is Amy Acker a perfect Beatrice, but Alexis Denisof is a perfect Benedick. I honestly doubt I could ever get tired of watching those two together.



Alexis Denisof appears in The Avengers as the Chitauri leader - a minor role - but I remember him best as vile, promiscuous Sandy Rivers on How I Met Your Mother. I understand he's the real-life spouse of Alyson Hannigan, HIMYM's Lily Aldrin and a Buffy alumna. This is my first exposure to his serious work.

The other Avengers veteran, of course, is Clark Gregg, who plays Agent Phil Coulson in the Marvel movies (and spin-off TV show) and heroine Hero's father Leonato, the governor of Messina (a province of Sicily), in this film. Hero is played by Jillian Morgese, making her debut in a feature role; her paramour Claudio is played by Fran Kranz. I'm unfamiliar with Kranz - apparently he appeared in the Whedon projects Dollhouse, which I know nothing about, and Cabin in the Woods, which I understand to be a horror film. I couldn't help but keep wishing for Robert Sean Leonard, who played Claudio in 1993 (after Dead Poet's Society, before House). I just loved RSL in that role. I loved Gregg as Leonato, though.



I had a hard time not tearing up with joy when Agents of SHIELD brought Coulson back from the dead.

Another actor I recognize is Reed Diamond, here playing Don Pedro, the Prince. He was also in Dollhouse, but I don't know what that is. I remember him from Homicide: Life of the Streets, my major TV obsession of the 1990s. He was Mike Kellerman, a character who came in about mid-series when he transferred from arson to homicide.

Speaking of investigators, Dogberry the constable is played here by Nathan Fillion. Although I think the actor is very good-looking, I haven't really seen him in anything. I never watched Firefly, I don't watch Castle, and the one episode I watched of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog failed to capture my interest. I like Michael Keaton in general, but I found him very hard to understand as Dogberry. I think Fillion does a much, much better job.



The constable and his deputies do bring up one of the down sides of this movie, though: it lacks even the remotest whiff of ethnic diversity in casting. There are two or three people of color who appear as extras in the entire film, none of whom have speaking roles. Really, Joss Whedon? Although it was a clever choice to make Dogberry and his constables look like the cast of a modern police procedural, what cop show since 1985 do you know of that's entirely lily-white? None. Cop shows, with their ensemble casts, are usually on the more progressive end of representational casting. And that's just one idea of how at least one person of color could have been cast in a speaking role in this film.



I mean, in 1993, Don Pedro was Denzel Washington and his brother, Don John, was played by Keanu Reeves (biracial; Caucasian and indigenous Hawaiian). We want the colorblind casting. We expect it. And yet, actual Renaissance-era Messina was more diverse than this movie, I'm sure. (Which makes sense, if you think about it, because even though we think of Italy as a predominantly Caucasian country, all the Mediterranean countries are equally accessible to European, North African, and Middle Eastern peoples who can navigate the Mediterranean Sea.)

For the villainous Don John, Whedon cast Sean Maher. I don't know who that is, but apparently he was on Firefly. What I know about Firefly is that it was set on a spaceship and Nathan Fillion played the captain.



So I'm probably missing some of the fun by not knowing all the Whedonite in-jokes with the cast, but I still felt like I got exactly what I wanted out of this movie. It was visually beautiful, clever, witty, and fun - everything you want out of a Shakespeare comedy, even though this is probably the darkest of the comedies. 

This is an affiliate link:

Hollywood Classics Title Index to All Movies Reviewed in Books 1 - 24 by John Howard Reid. $0.99 from Smashwords.com
Another essential book for a film buff's library, this one is packed with information and reviews. Some of the entries are quite extensive. JHR provides all the information you need, including complete cast and production staff. I find JHR's information invaluable. I like to read not only who acted in a movie, but who made it, both top-billed and lesser mortals. -- Ross Adams in DRESS CIRCLE mag.

Gravity: The Movie (Spoilers)

Major spoilers for Gravity abound here - if you haven't seen the movie yet and don't want to know what happens in it, turn back now!

Public domain image from NASA showing Edward White performing a spacewalk

I saw Gravity, the 2013 film directed by Alfonso Cuaron and starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney on Saturday, October 5th. I went with my parents and husband - we saw it in 3D. I hadn't seen a movie in the theater since Life of Pi. As with Life of Pi, I was glad we paid the few extra dollars for the 3D experience.

First we saw a preview of Keanu Reeves' latest, 47 Ronin. Rick Genest is in it. I bet makeup artists love Rick Genest because he's, like, 90% done already when he sits in the makeup chair. But I digress.

Gravity, in some ways, is a very minimalist film. The only actors whose faces we see are Bullock and Clooney. For the first act, the backdrop is the earth, mostly covered in pillowy clouds but with bright stripes of human habitation shining through.

Sandra Bullock in 2009; Creative Commons image by Angela George

Later, we move through various human-created environments in space: first the destroying Explorer shuttle, then the International Space Station and a Soyuz module, then the Chinese space station and its escape pod. Those are very mechanized, artificial environments, and all are portrayed as overflowing with weightless human-made junk. However, the film starts out very starkly, with simple white letters on a black background reminding us that there is neither atmosphere nor gravitational pull in the void of space, and life in such an environment is therefore impossible.

I'm no great student of the films of Alfonso Cuaron; I think the only other one of his movies that I've seen is Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. (It's my favorite HP movie, but that's not necessarily because of Cuaron's directing. I do think he did a great job, though.) I don't know anything about his philosophies, but I do think he tried to get us to notice something:

Space.

Is.

Death.

Creative Commons image

I mean, he told us essentially that in the opening titles. When we first meet the three astronauts engaged in their mission, though, they seem to be vibrantly full of life. Clooney's character, Matt Kowalsky, is engaged in snappy banter with mission control and the two astronauts who are aboard the shuttle as he tests a jet pack. Dr. Ryan Stone (Bullock), a physician trained as an astronaut to test equipment with medical applications, is extremely focused on her work. The third spacewalker, Dr. Sharif, performs repairs while dancing.

Then, shit goes spectacularly wrong when the Russians blow up one of their own satellites, setting off a chain-reaction debris avalanche. The crew attempts an emergency evac, but it's too late: Kowalsky and Stone are the only survivors. (Zero points for ethnic diversity; there's one Indian-American or Pakistani-American character, and he's dead within minutes. We see his face only after the character's death and in a photograph.) Kowalsky manages to rescue Stone from her free spiral through empty space, but in the process of reaching the ISS, must sacrifice himself so that Stone has a chance to survive.

If the movie can be broken down to its most essential conflicts, they would be woman vs. nature and woman vs. herself, and this is essentially the story of one woman's survival. You can think of it as a female version of 27 Hours. But - and bear with me here - I think one possible interpretation of this movie is that Ryan Stone is NOT a survivor, but in fact dies in space and is reborn when she emerges from the Chinese space capsule in the ocean.

The most obvious reference to the fact that the human-made environments in space serve as a second womb for Stone occurs when she first reaches the ISS airlock. Stone strips out of her oxygen-depleted flight suit, closes her eyes, curls up into a fetal position and floats in mid-air, thick tethers serving as an artificial umbilical cord. The visual is far too obvious to be a coincidence.

And why would she need to be reborn? Because she's dead - not in an all-too-literal Sixth Sense sense, but at least in this metaphorical sense: she "died" when her daughter died. What does she do on earth? Work, then drive, listening to the radio. She goes into orbit to do the exact same things: work, "drive," listen to the radio. Listening to the disembodied voices on the radio is her way of disconnecting from actual, living human beings; she goes into a world of ghosts. In her ghost world, Stone learns she can talk to her deceased daughter again. She can talk to Kowalsky after his noble self-sacrifice; he can even answer her, offer her the Russians' hidden stash of vodka, and - most importantly - help her solve problems. She sees dead people, but fights to return to the land of the living. Space is death. The only life is life on earth.

(Yes, there is a neuro-biological explanation for why she imagines or hallucinates Kowalsky: she's turned down to the oxygen in the Soyuz capsule to less than what her brain needs, and she's experiencing oxygen deprivation.)

The International Space Station, with Soyuz capsule, in a public domain/NASA photo

So Ryan Stone saves herself, using the last bit of thrust the Soyuz possesses to reach the abandoned Chinese space station and return to earth in its escape pod. When she hits the ocean, her capsule catches fire, and rather than waiting to be rescued, she has to submerge it and swim out. Bursting out from a liquid-filled metallic womb, rising to the surface to take her first gasp of air? Definitely a birth scene, without a doubt. The last frames of the movie show Stone standing up in the sand and taking her first steps.

You could almost say there's an ecological message to this movie: care for the earth, because it's the only thing keeping us alive, and beyond it there's nothing but cold junk and death. Rebirth is clearly a central theme of the movie. You could say that Stone has been reincarnated after she's died and gone to "the heavens." Reincarnation is also suggested by the Buddha images the Chinese astronauts left on the monitor in their escape pod (the Buddha being one of the few enlightened beings able to escape an otherwise endless cycle of births, deaths, and reincarnations)*.

Creative Commons photo by Jakub Halun

Incidentally, the Russian capsule bears an image of St. Christopher with the Christ child on his shoulders. This makes sense for cosmonauts, because Christopher is the patron saint of travelers and sailors traditionally pray to him during storms. In this case, the "storm" was also caused by the Russians.

If you're one who believes in reincarnation in terms of a goddess-centered vision of the afterlife, then it might make sense to you that the earth itself is the goddess in this scenario. At death (and I think we can make the case that Stone is at least metaphorically dead when she leaves the earth's atmosphere, in the sense that she "stopped living" when her daughter died), one's soul leaves the earth/ascends to the heavens (as in Norse mythology, when the Valkyries come down from the sky on their flying horses and carry the fallen warriors upward), one is separated from the goddess, but then one returns to the body of the goddess (in this case, under the ocean, which is depicted as teeming with life), is born again, and lives another life.

Although the Gaia Hypothesis - that the earth and everything on it function as one living organism - is a scientific and not religious school of thought, people sometimes do adapt it to religious purposes - i.e. worshiping the earth itself as a deity because life cannot exist without it. Was Cuaron hinting at something like this when he directed this movie? I have no idea, but he plants some intriguing clues.

Alfonso Cuaron in a Creative Commons image by Gage Skidmore

*Someone please let me know if I am incorrect and that statue wasn't a Buddha.

This is an affiliate link:

Hollywood Classics Title Index to All Movies Reviewed in Books 1 - 24 by John Howard Reid. $0.99 from Smashwords.com
Another essential book for a film buff's library, this one is packed with information and reviews. Some of the entries are quite extensive. JHR provides all the information you need, including complete cast and production staff. I find JHR's information invaluable. I like to read not only who acted in a movie, but who made it, both top-billed and lesser mortals. -- Ross Adams in DRESS CIRCLE mag.

Book Club Friday: Princesses Behaving Badly

Happy Friday! This week went really fast (time flies when you're learning how to work your husband's hemodialysis machine), and now it's time for Book Club Friday once again.

Princesses Behaving Badly: Real Stories from History Without the Fairy-Tale Endings by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disney princesses, these women are not. But if you've ever wanted to know what a princess's life is REALLY like, without the singing crustaceans, this may be the book for you.

Does anyone else remember Uppity Women of Medieval Times and some of the other titles that Vicki León and some others* used to write for Conari Press (now part of Red Wheel/Weiser)? There was a whole series in the 1990s that sought to fight the erasure of herstory by bringing to light some of the lesser-known, but fascinating, women in history. This book is like a mini-course in that.

Like the Uppity Women series (its foremother), this book divides the women into categories, such as Warriors, Partiers, and Madwomen, rather than proceeding in strict chronological order. It focuses mainly on European history - the Germano-British House of Hanover seems to be a favorite subject - but is just multicultural enough to pass the sniff test.

Some of the women you'll find between the pages include:

- Pingyang (7th century China)
- Boudicca (1st century Britain)
- Durgavati (16th century India)
- Hatshepsut (ca. 1500 BCE Egypt)
- Njinga of Ndongo (17th century West Africa - what is now Angola)
- Roxolana (16th century Ottoman Empire)
- La Malinche (16th century Mexico)
- Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute people, 1844-1891)
- Margaret Windsor (1930-2002, sister of Elizabeth II of England)

The writing style is very informal, which some reviewers have disliked (one compared it to the tone of a gossip magazine), and I have to say, I see their point. I think what bothered me the most was that some of the passages about allegedly promiscuous princesses took on what I felt was too judgmental a tone. (To be fair, Napoleon and some of the Hanover kings get a little slut-shamed, too, so it isn't a particularly gender-biased strain of judgment.)

If you can forgive a narrative whose voice can, at times, be a bit intrusive, and you're a young person considering a history or women's studies major, or you're fascinated with history as a hobby, or you're a not-necessarily-younger person who's fascinated with royalty in general or who wants to brush up on some of the lesser-known women in political history, I recommend this book to you as a good jumping-on point. If you find a favorite, I'm sure you'll go on to research her in more depth.

Another complaint I noticed in briefly skimming over some previous reviews was that not all the women in the book are, strictly speaking, princesses. Some of them are impostors, or from cultures without a formalized system of royal titles, and some of them (especially in the early chapters) are legendary figures who may not have basis in historical fact. This part didn't particularly bother me; if Rodriguez McRobbie had stuck to a very formal definition of princesshood, the book would almost certainly have been more Eurocentric and less interesting.

I'm fairly happy with her selections, and with the depth of information she got into with most of them. I do think we need (frequent) reminders that history was never a male-only affair, so I appreciate the efforts of books such as these. I would buy it for my nieces, but I'd also try to get them to retain it as just one part of a larger women's history bookshelf.



I received an advance reading copy of this book through the Amazon Vine Program at no charge in exchange for this review. I was not otherwise compensated for this review, which is my own honest opinion.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

Next Amazon Vine picks to read by next month:

*Including Autumn Stephens, whose latest book is Feisty First Ladies, available from Cleis Press. I saw it in the Viva Editions catalog when Cleis Press sent me a copy of Mitzi Szereto's The Wilde Passions of Dorian Gray. - Note noted on November 5, 2013.

Handmade Mini Comic: Jesus and Ganesha Go To Valhalla by MJ Alexander

A nice surprise came in the mail yesterday. It's the mini comic booklet Jesus and Ganesha Go to Valhalla, written by MJ Alexander and Adam Kuphos and illustrated by MJ Alexander.

It's gorgeous work. The plot revolves around a young girl and boy having a toy boat race. She's sailing her boat for Ganesha, and he's sailing his boat for Jesus. The race will determine who is the true lord - but Odin has a different idea.

It's only an 8-page mini-comic, but I only paid $3.50 for it, including shipping from MJ's Canadian home to me in the U.S.

She even wrote me a thank-you and included a sticker. Canadian politeness - not just a legend.

Here is a review by Carrie Q. at Peaches and Zines.

So, if you want to support a very young, very indie illustrator, I highly recommend you visit MJ's Etsy shop. I have absolutely no affiliation with MJ's Etsy shop whatsoever - I'm just a fan of her work. I can't resist a handmade book, especially with a title like Jesus and Ganesha Go to Valhalla.

MJ's Etsy shop: http://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/Snartha?ref=l2-shopheader-name

                                                 Amazon Music: Six Months of Disney+

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Oh How Pinteresting Wednesday: Black and White

I haven't fallen off the face of the earth, but I have been in home hemodialysis training with my husband. It's going well. He's been on dialysis a week and a half and already feels better/has more energy. Yesterday I got to practice poking needles into a dummy arm, in preparation for when I'll have to cannulate him. It's a little scary. But it's okay. 

While I'm away, let's hook up with The Vintage Apple for the once-monthly OHP! Wednesday. 

This is what happens when we can't wait for J.K. Rowling's latest project to come to fruition. 

This is what happens when we put James Franco on all the book covers.