Musings of Two Creative Minds

  I love a good anthology, or collection of short stories. Naturally, when I spotted this book in a used bookstore, I was intrigued by the title and the image on the cover. After reading the synopsis on the back cover, I decided it was worth checking out. And boy was I right to do so. I thoroughly enjoyed each of these odd little mysteries. As the cover indicates, there are only 8 stories contained in this volume, and each one (even though a couple of the tales takes place outdoors) have been referred to as a "locked room" mystery, which makes the collection all the more interesting for me.  Similar to Arthur Conan Doyle's beloved Sherlock Holmes, we are introduced to Mr. Trevis Tarrant, through our narrator Jerry Phelan who first encounters Tarrant in the first story involving an ancient codex in a museum. And also like Holmes, Tarrant has an affinity for 'unusual' cases or problems. But, there the similarities end. We soon learn that Trevis Tarrant is more willi...

KIRKUS BOOK REVIEW In Krummenacker and Caminiti’s paranormal thriller series starter set in the Civil War era, an Irish immigrant on a spy mission fights monsters and discovers a new superpower. The story opens on a man named Jacob Long, who’s carrying his infant daughter in a blizzard, encountering a great beast called a Skinwalker, which gains different powers depending on what pelts it acquires. The creature protects the child when a pack of monsters attack. Readers soon learn that the monsters are under the control of a mysterious figure working with an assassin named Lansford Hastings. The plot transitions to the main character, Keefer O’Connor, an Irishman who’s made a name for himself as a military strategist. This leads to his recruitment by Union Army Provost Marshal Lafayette Baker, and soon, Keefer is promoted from a captain to a colonel by the War Department. He’s assigned a mission to assassinate Gov. Fredrick Low of California if he sways from his antislavery stanc...

It's been a while since I did a book review so I'd say we're do for a new one. Right? Well even if you said no, this post is going to be a book review anyway, especially since the book in question is by an author I've long heard about and was a huge influence on HP Lovecraft (one of my favorite authors of all time). Now some of you may have already figured out who I'm talking about, but for those who haven't caught on, I'm referring to Lord Dunsany (better known by friends and family as Edward Plunkett, the 18th Baron of Dunsany). Now as I said before, I've heard of Lord Dunsany from my collection of HP Lovecraft books which often reference his lordship as having a big influence on the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos. And I'd been rather interested in trying some of his work for some time. However, I'm one of those readers who likes shall we say... a sampling of an author's work before committing myself to a full novel. So, I read a lot of coll...

My rating: 5 STARS -  This Series Keeps Getting Better and Better... This may be my favorite installment of this series to date. Between this one and the two previous books I'm feeling like the series is maturing as a whole. The first book "Soul Taker" did a good job of introducing us to the author's vision of this world, while "Sundance" and "Demon Tracker" started fleshing that world and its characters out more and more. In "Bounty Hunter" we dive more deeply into this series and get a new perspective from one of the actual members of the Council of Twelve. This time we start out seeing things from the perspective of Centriel who having seen how the world's of his fellow Archangels have changed, and wondering if he will ever find such happiness. Then he meets Simin a Demon Hunter and soon both their worlds' are turned upside down, and we are soon drawn deeper into the manipulations of Hell and it's many minions. Finally, I w...

Review by Helen Krummenacker This book was copyrighted in 1962, which explains why it reads like a very old-fashioned, Cold War Era story on one hand, with the language of the era, and yet has elements that would be futuristic by today’s standards. It also predates the period where writers decided longer is better-- it’s decidedly light on padding and has a crispness to the language. Overall, it reads like a Young Adult novel, not demanding much of the reader but imagination and a bit of tolerance for mild sexism and ablism. The writers, Randall Garrett and Lawrence Janifer, give us an FBI agent assigned a seemingly impossible case: there is a spy working, presumably for the Russians, to ferret out what is happening with a project for a new kind of space drive. The reason that catching the spy may be impossible is that the spy is a telepath. By coincidence, a second research project at the same facility had been studying telepathy and developed the means to determine when someon...