Literary rating: ★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆ I don’t necessarily expect to understand a literary universe from the first page. These things take time: I get that. But I do expect that, as I go through the chapters, things will become clear. If I reach the end, and am still vague… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆ With the somewhat accurate and rather clunky sub-title of “True stories of the unsung women heroes who rescued refugees and Allied servicemen in WWII”, this is a book whose idea I liked rather more than the execution. The core is six chapters, each devoted… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆ It’s funny. You wait ages for an action heroine novel set in Arizona, then two show up at once. Right on the heels of The Killing Game, we have this, which takes place almost entirely in this state’s most iconic location, the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½ On the surface, Scala City is an idyllic, hi-tech world of prosperity, peace and morality, albeit at the cost of omnipresent surveillance of its residents. But there’s a dirty little secret. The Blind Spot is an area where surveillance is barred, and where the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½ I don’t subscribe to the belief that authors need to be the same sex, race, religion or whatever as their characters. A good author can put you inside the head of their heroine, even if they’re a different species, an extra-terrestrial, or whatever. But… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½ This is written by a husband and wife duo, which is a nice idea. I wonder how Chris would react if I suggested writing a novel to her? Unfortunately, the results are a little disappointing. It feels like the execution is better than the… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½ This is a solid, no-nonsense combination of spy and science-fiction. Though, to be honest, it is skewed towards the former genre, with the latter mostly window-dressing. It wouldn’t take much to change the setting from a solar system whose ownership is disputed by a… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆½ When the apocalypse comes, if popular fiction is any guide, it’s going to be undead and craving brains. But not far behind in terms of literary popularity, appears to be an EMP. This is a high altitude nuclear detonation, which would unleash an electromagnetic… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ★★★ Bold is an incredibly prolific author, whose site lists eight separate series of novels, with a total of sixty-four books between them. The series are mostly named in the format, “ FBI thriller”, which does suggest a certain production-line quality to them. I wonder… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆ Not many novels come with a ringing endorsement from a former director of the CIA, but Gina Haspel calls this “A thoroughly enjoyable, engrossing thriller.” Argue with her, and she’ll send you an exploding cigar, or something. While it certainly isn’t bad, the rating… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆½ If you’re even slightly familiar with the Star Trek universe, you’ll be aware of the Prime Directive. While never explicitly stated, it’s the rule which prohibits interfering with the development of less technologically advanced civilization, in particular those that are not capable of space… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆ It’s often forgotten that America didn’t join World War II until almost three years after it started. In the early days, there was a strong isolationist movement, which saw the conflict as other countries’ problems, from people like aviator Charles Lindbergh and broad groups… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½ DEA agent Jack Thorne and his wife are killed, and his reputation shredded after his death. His 12-year-old daughter Lou only escapes courtesy of her father’s sacrifice, and an unwanted innate talent, which she shares with her aunt, Lucy. Lou has the ability –… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆½ The literary rating is mostly down to the sluggish way in which this gets going. Though having subsequently discovered this is the first in a fourteen volume series, it’s perhaps understandable if the author decided to slow-play things in the early stages. Still, as… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆☆ This book is the official novelization of the 2005 movie of the same name, starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. I don’t share the idea that movie novelizations are by definition trash, devoid of any possible literary quality. Like movies based on books, they… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½ I was disappointed by the lack of tentacles. However, there were certainly no shortage of teeth in this post-apocalyptic tale, which takes place decades after the arrival of monsters, from an uncertain source, has led to the collapse of civilization on Earth. The survivors… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½ This SF novel takes place in the future where the human Commonwealth is engaged in a brutal space war against the militaristic Shrehari Empire – imagine Klingons on krack, perhaps. They have superior technology, but humanity’s ability to think outside the box and improvise… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½ “It just seemed as if Hell opened up one day and that was that. Instant carnage, liberated monsters, death for all. They rose from somewhere beneath the ground, attacking for no clear reason and killing until God knows when.” That’s how this starts, so… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½ This is a sequel to Saving Karma, also by Reid Bracken, and follows on from the events there. When we last saw heroine Bree Thomas, she had taken down, in spectacular fashion, the city belonging to Chinese business mogul Aslam Meng, which was a front… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆ There are reviews which are easy to write, because – good or bad – the subject generates a lot to talk about. This is not one of those. It’s a bland slice of semi-urban fantasy, which just… sits there, the literary equivalent of a bowl… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆½ As the title suggests, this is one of those literary mash-ups, similar to Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. However, beyond the steampunk influence apparent from the title, this adds another major twist, with the universe here being a gender-swapped one. For in this world,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆ Although this is the eighth book in the author’s trail-blazing (at the time it was written, action-oriented heroines were nowhere near as numerous in fiction as they are now) series, it’s the third that I’ve read. (Long story!) It was published in 1976; but… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆ This is the second novel in the author’s Unsanctioned Guardians trilogy, a prequel to her earlier Elioud Legacy series. The new trilogy presents the background of how the three heroines of the first one (all of whom were intelligence agents, though of different nationalities)… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆ Like the previous two books, this conclusion to the Unsanctioned Guardians trilogy (a prequel to the Elioud Legacy trilogy) was a generous gift to me from the author. (There was no pressure to write a positive review; the book stands easily on its merits,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆ Published in 2019, this is the opening volume of Wolfpack Publishing’s Avenging Angels series. My wife Barb and I had previously read the seventh and second installments out of order (long story!); and having really liked those, we recently decided to commit to reading… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆ “A. W. Hart,” the nominal author of the Avenging Angels series, is actually a house pen name used by Wolfpack Publishing for the multiple authors of this and one or two of their other series. Where books are marketed or shelved by the author’s… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆ To be frank, I was expecting rather more action given the title here. Almost all of it, however, takes place “off-screen”, as it were, being described second-hand, rather than experienced. It makes sense in the context of the book, and it’s not badly written.… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½ It’s a little hard to explain the universe in which this takes place. Humanity existed. However, their encounter with other races proved problematic for a variety of reasons, and led to them being exterminated, a genocide that was partly collateral damage in a war… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½ This is another entry in the sprawling Kurtherian Gambit universe, which must have well over a hundred books in it, by a slew of different authors. I’m gradually coming to a couple of conclusions: a) it’s a very loosely-tied series, and b) the quality… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆ This is set around fifty years after “the Provocation”, a series of unsolved mass abductions which led to Capernica becoming a strictly-controlled hierarchical society of Uppers, Lowers and the Military. Orphan Jaclyn Holloway is a Lower, living in near poverty in the seaside town… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★★★Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆½ Liane Zane brings her Elioud Legacy trilogy to a rousing and powerful conclusion in this novel, which was actually my favorite of the three. (Full disclosure at the outset: Liane, who’s a Goodreads friend of mine, generously gifted me with a paperback ARC, because she… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆ Liane Zane’s Elioud Legacy trilogy, all three books of which I’ve previously reviewed, is supernatural fiction, written by a Roman Catholic author, and premised on the fictional conceit that matings between angelic beings (both fallen and unfallen) and humans have been going on since… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆ I am, probably, biased here. Scottish action heroines are pretty rare, to the point I am hard pushed to think of a single one I’ve covered previously, in the twenty years I’ve been running this domain. [I just made myself feel very old…] So… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆ Cora Blackthorn’s teenage life has been severely hampered by an untreatable condition, which triggers a severe, painful reaction any time she has physical contact with another human being. She spends her live sequestered on Orcas Island, off the coast in the Pacific Northwest, but… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆ While a quick read, at 205 pages, after slogging through a couple of what can only be described as “chonkers”, I really didn’t mind. It’s briskly-paced, hits the ground running and largely doesn’t stop thereafter. I have some concerns about where things might go… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆ Like “Franklin W. Dixon” and “Carolyn Keene,” “A. W. Hart” is the house pen name assigned by the publisher to all the various authors of individual books in the series of which this novel is the seventh installment. In this case, though, A. W.… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★½ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆ It’s the year 2369, and Astrid Amundsen is an officer in training, in her fourth year at the Annapolis Naval Academy [we’re talking space navy, obviously]. As part of her education, she and four other recruits are assigned as midshipmen on the USS Valley… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆ This dystopian future takes place after the United States of America is no longer united, having fragmented into a group of disparate regions that exist in an uneasy piece with each other. The heroine is 14-year-old Caroline, who lives in a remote part of… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆ What I’ll remember about this one is the arc. Not so much of any character, more as to whether or not this would qualify for the site. The story began on solid enough ground, but around the end of the first volume (this omnibus… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
Literary rating: ★★ Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆ The structure here is kinda odd. While each of the three volumes included in this omnibus are effectively standalone stories, they each feel so slight as almost not to be worth bothering with. In particular, there seems to be a lot of descriptive padding,… Continue reading| Girls With Guns
