Liked this did not love it. The book opens up with Munroe engaged in a situation that doesn’t seem to make sense and then goes on from there. I enjoyed this tale of piracy and African political intrigue but I sort of didn’t get how she even got there in the first place. A lot of out-of-character stuff for a character that we’d gotten to know pretty well over time. Not a bad book but my least favorite of all of them so far.

Still on the gross side, these books are nonetheless fun to read. This one is about the underground system of kidnapping young girls and getting them into the hands of truly awful people. Super yikky but the plot is interesting and the lead character (away from her partner this time) gets to do a lot f what she does best. An ending that confused me until I read the next book.

This was a funny little novella that takes place in a timeframe that sort of also happens in the end of The Doll. Munroe is on her own and goes after the super creepy guy from the last book. I sort of blindly picked this up and didn’t really know it was a mini-novel so was surprised when it ended but otherwise enjoyed it.

This may have been a bit too icky for my tastes but I really like the semi-androgynous main character Vanessa Michael Munroe who we saw in the Informationist and wanted to see more of her. In this book she’s going down to Argentina trying to get a young girl out of a gross cult where children are routinely abused. But, it gets complicated. As much as I was happy they didn’t do that usual trope-ish thing of trying to get to the girl before her honor is besmirched, it still had a bit too much icky child abuse in it for my personal tastes. Enjoyed the internal conflicts of the main character. Will definitely pick up the next book.

Gibson’s stories have an eerie calm about them even if he’s talking about some rather complex topics like time travel and the impending economic disaster that is maybe about the happen. This is a very Gibson-like story that spans two time periods and the intertwingling between them. Lots of good female characters. LGBT characters like it’s no big deal. Lots of good internet-style jokes and turns of phrase. Reading his books makes you realize just how much most of the books I read do not really speak to me the way Gibson’s books do. I read this over the past week and I am sorry it’s over.

Enjoyed this dystopic look at a future where drugs can allow us some semblance of telepathy and the friction that is caused by people who want to free up those drugs versus those who want to control them. That said it was super duper bloody and gory much more than I would have read if I had known that. Everyone, the good guys and the bad guys, get really relentlessly pummeled, hurt and seriously maimed and wounded. I’ve heard great things about Naam’s non-fiction work and I have no doubt that he knows his stuff, I’m just not sure if it’s the right stuff for me.

Unlike French’s other book, this one was long and the descriptions seemed interesting and useful not just long “what the hell is going on” types of writing. I liked this mystery that has one of the characters from her earlier book now as a nearly-grown teenager at a private school where a murder happened. There’s a lot of whodunit stuff but it’s all mostly secondary to the actual plot which is about teenaged friendships and the general nostalgia for youth thing that French seemed to be trying to get at in her Broken Harbor novel but didn’t quite manage. I read these two books long after the first three so I didn’t relate to the cop buddy angle of the story (couldn’t keep straight who was who from before) but there is a lot of nice personal-friend dynamics to be explored there as well.

Got this right when it came out from the library by getting on the hold list early. Enjoyed it. Good to see the familiar characters again. The story was a little pat in the ending but otherwise pretty nifty. A side-trip to Philly and a little more progression with Gunther’s relationship with Beverly. Enjoyable but maybe not in my top three.