Happy Easter, all!
I hope you're enjoying your Spring, although the weather hasn't been all that cooperative. (After all, we did have snow earlier this week). Still, the days are getting longer and the temperatures are getting warmer. Soon you'll be doing your reading outside. Here are some suggestions for you.
Series
Rebels of Babylon - Owen Parry ($7.99/$.50, copyright 2005, 384 pages, Paperback)
This is another volume in the Abel Jones series from Parry. Jones is a major in the Union army during the Civil War who's tasked by the President to look into certain things. Here, he's been sent to New Orleans to find out how and why the daughter of a rich, political donor from the North wound up dead under embarrassing circumstances. Parry has a great knack for bringing the locale of his stories to life, and he does a great job of writing the dialog in the different "dialects" that exist in that melting pot of New Orleans from the French patois through a lower-class British accent and up
to Jones' Welsh. This one starts off with a chase and never slows down. There are characters that ooze New Orleans. There is a side note of voodoo. There is the negro question. And there is more of Jones religious beliefs and some interesting counterpoints. I enjoyed it.
Murder at Fenway Park - Troy Soos ($14.00/$.50, copyright 1994, 252 pages, Paperback)
Though the opening and closing chapters take place in the present day, the bulk of this novel is done as a flash-back to 1912. Soos' main character is Mickey Rawlings, a utility baseball player just picked up by the Boston Red Sox. He's late getting to Fenway Park for his first day and stumbles across a dead body. That's the set-up. I have to admit that I'm not a big baseball fan, and I know next to nothing about it's history, but Soos seems to. He peoples this story with players and references that I assume are real. And he has a real feel for the times - how people dressed, what things cost, etc. In between traveling from city to city on the hunt for the World Series title, Mickey tries to piece together what happened while dealing with another murder and the suspicions of the police. I enjoyed it.
Rogue Island - Bruce De Silva ($14.99/$3.99, copyright 2010, 302 pages, Trade Paperback)
About a month or so ago, I read a book review in the Star Ledger that was about the most recent book in De Silva's series. I was interested and spent some time trying to find the previous volumes, finally ordering the first one from Thriftbooks. The main character is Liam Mulligan, a reporter for a newspaper in Providence, Rhode Island. He's old school, and has connections on both sides of the law. In this book, He's investigating a string of fires in his old neighborhood and dealing with a soon-to-be ex-wife, a new girlfriend, and politics. Then things get worse. People he knows die in the fires, and his life is threatened. De Silva's characters, in many cases, are stereotypes, but he gives them quirks that set them apart from the usual ones. Especially Mulligan, who's not as tough as he'd like people to think he is. I have to admit that I could see where De Silva was going with some of the characters and situations but I was surprised at the ending. I enjoyed it.
Comic Books
Runaways -Brian K. Vaughan, writer; Adrian Alphona, illustrator (($9.99, $.25, first published in single issues in 2011, issues 1 - 6, Trade Paperback)
Vaughan made a name for himself on two previous series' - "Y: The Last Man" and "Ex Machina", both of which he wrote, and I have to admit that I only read a few issues of each. The "Runaways" was a series he created for Marvel. It revolves around 6 teenagers who only meet when their parents get together several times a year. As it turns out, their parents are a group of Super-villains and the kids have found this out. When the parents find out that they know, the kids are in trouble and they hit the road. Oh, and the kids have all developed powers that they didn't realize until now. I wanted to like this but I found the characters to be one-dimensional and there's no real action. I didn't like it.
Ultimate Comics Spider-Man - Brian Michael Bendis, writer; Sara Pichelli, illustrator ($7.99/$.0, first published in single issues in 2012, issues 1-5, Trade Paperback)
This is not my Spider-Man, nor is it my Marvel. Several years ago, Marvel started the Ultimate line to draw in new readers who might be confused by all the years of back-story that their characters had. But, somewhere along the line, they started to take chances. This is one of them. They killed Peter Parker. And some young kid named Miles Morales - a likable, Hispanic guy - gets bit by a radioactive spider and takes up the mantle. OK, it's not quite that simple and it involves Norman Osborn, Nick Fury, Spider-Woman, Electro and others but, still, the end result is the same. Again, this is not my Spider-Man and I'm pretty sure Marvel has bailed on the whole Ultimate line, but Bendis is a great writer and it flows well. I did find it hard, at times, to follow which way the illustrations went, though. I didn't want to, but I liked it.
I've picked up some really large books recently that look very interesting and I hope to be able to tell you about some of them next month. Until then, go outside and enjoy the Spring and ...
Keep reading.
