Digital Analogue

Perfect poison

On the road trip home, I listened to the book The perfect poison by Amanda Quick. It was the most singularly curious assortment of genres that I can recall ever reading: while I picked it up at the library thinking it was a mystery/thriller (based on a quick skim of the blurb on the back), it could also rightly be described as low fantasy, or period fiction, or even as a romance novel. Set in the late Victorian period, its main characters are upperclass English with paranormal abilities and its plot revolves around a thinly-disguised rehash of a philosopher's stone; so its low-fantasy cred is fairly well-established. Murders and attempted murders also figure in strongly, with a few narrow escapes, so definitely solid as a suspense novel (which is what I like to listen to for the long road trips). But while there can certainly be sex scenes in novels outside the romance genre, these were somewhat more graphic than I'm accustomed to! On the other hand, I literally burst out laughing at some of the ridiculous descriptions and setups the author used for those scenes---are all romance novels so silly?

Anyway, it wasn't half bad, even with the silliness. I'd certainly be willing to at least try this author's other work.

(After that book ended I got a start on Left behind, which was a bit of an impulse pick because I figured I should read it if I'm going to be critical of the series. So far it's somewhat different than I expected, although I believe I already see a bait-and-switch being set up, so we'll see.)

"Major USA-Asia wars since WWII: one loss, one tie, two in OT. Too bad. I like our troops, but I especially like them alive and defending the USA instead of dead or being made to stir up hornets' nests a world away." --Matt Zanon