Recent Reads

94. Panic
I'm visiting with my tween nieces, so am trying out some new YA authors.

Teenagers in small towns are always looking for some action, and in this story high school graduates play a high stakes game, where the last person standing wins $60,000. The story is told with two narrators who want to win for different reasons. Written for a young adult audience, this is a coming of age story with death stalking the players. I found it an OK read - rather predictable with lots of action, but not much depth. Rating: 2 stars.

95. Tripwire (Jack Reacher #3)
It must be me. There are over 33,000 reviews of this book on GoodReads, and and the average rating is 4.05 stars. This is my third attempt at reading the very popular Jack Reacher series by Lee Child, but I fear that it will be my last. I looked back at my reviews of the first two books in the series, and realize that I have felt this way from the start, but I so wanted to join the fan club of this series that I tried again. 

Reacher is digging pools in Key West, when strangers show up looking for him. It takes him finding one of those people dead to head up to New York to see if he can get to the bottom of what is going on. I found the Vietnam War information interesting, but found myself rolling my eyes every time Jodie skipped - on her way to work, on her way toward him - really how many thirty year old lawyers in business attire have you seen skipping? The pacing is slow, the plot plodding, the characters one dimensional, and oh yeah, I could tell how this was going to go down fairly early on in the story. I slogged through to the end, and the description of Reacher's well defined pecs acting like three inches of Kevlar had my eyes rolling so far back that I almost harmed myself. Three strikes and Reacher is out. Rating: 1 star.

96. Alpha & Omega (Locke & Key #6)
This is the final installment in the Locke & Key graphic novel series, so there was a lot of ground to cover. Bad things continue to happen, and the high school graduation after party does not go as planned. I have enjoyed the creativity and artwork in this series, but the ending did feel a little too tidy. Still a fun and disturbing read. Rating: 3 stars.