Deeply Odd by Dean Koontz

Sixth in my beloved but somewhat annoying series by Koontz.

I adored the first one, didn't care for the second, loved the 3rd, etc. from there on out. There were several pieces to the sixth book that I really enjoyed, a change from the formula.

Odd Thomas is a special fry cook, currently unemployed. He's stowing away in a house on the water with Annamaria, the ever-pregnant mysterious woman from the last book, and with Tim who is also from the last book but is such a bit player here, I forgot who he was.

Odd goes in to town for staples, jeans and socks, but because this is a Koontz book, he never gets his jeans...kind of.

Odd has a talent for seeing lingering spirits of the dead and being drawn towards things. In this case, he is drawn towards an 18-wheeler and, for his efforts, nearly gets shot in the crotch. Um.... it's really going to be a bumpy ride.

Alfred Hitchcock is his spirit companion and Boo the spirit dog is still around as well. Children are going missing and Odd is the only one who can save them, with the help of spry Mrs. Fischer.

The book speaks in riddles, so will my review. This is a good one, not great, and with such an ending that I have to believe the next Odd book is nigh.

Inferno by Dan Brown

I think I read this at the wrong time.

I had just finished A Discovery of Witches when I got this from the library. I have enjoyed all of Brown's work so I didn't stop to think that the exhaustive detail from ADOW would have worn me out so that I didn't enjoy Brown's exhaustive detail nearly as much. Overload.

Langdon wakes in a hospital with a head wound and amnesia AND someone trying to kill him. Oh and he's in Florence Italy, when the last he remembered he was in Boston. A pretty young doctor, Sienna Brooks, helps him through this very Dante infused mystery. As I said, I was not into the amount of detail, although I'm sure it was all interesting, but I persisted because I knew that Brown would turn this world on it's head.

And he did.

I refuse to give anything away but I was pretty satisfied with the weird twist and the ambiguous ending.

I need a much simpler book to rest my brain now.

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

This didn't turn out like I thought it was going to be.

I suppose I was expecting more.... plot and less romance between a vampire and witch. I choose not to read up on anything about this book before I tackled the 24+ hours of it from Audible.com. So with the positives, I really enjoyed the narrator, she was quite good.

I was ok going into this book because the (sub)plot of the bewitched manuscript and Diana Bishop being threatened for it. But enter Matthew Clairmont, vampire scientist/doctor. I was still alright with that for a bit. I was pretty much fine when the plot became the subplot and the romance got the spotlight (I do not read romance, nor do I want to).

I started cringing though because of Diana. She was a petulant child. I felt that most of what came out of her mouth (with some literal foot stomping) just sounded like a whiny brat. I cringe harder when Matthew kept calling her brave and a lioness. I wanted to slap the crap out of her.

This is the part that I have trouble with, the whiny adult falling in love with a "big strong man" who constantly picks her up and carries her. UGH.

I did like a lot of the other characters, however, and might read the rest of the trilogy for them. Miriam, for example, speaks like I do. Blunt, to the point, deal with it. Marcus, Matthew's son, could have a grand role to play in the next book as well as Sara and Em, Diana's aunt and her partner. Loved them, loved the ghosts in the Bishop house and Sophie and Nathaniel. So how did I end up hating Diana SO much?

Ah well...

And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Hosseini's 3rd book and I'm an official fan. I guess I thought the first two could be flukes (no I didn't, they were wonderful).

I wasn't entirely sure where this one was going. We started out with a fable, then went into the journey of little Pari and her big brother, Abdullah. They are with their father, walking to Kabul from their little village to meet with their uncle Nabi. It's not like I would give anything away by saying more, but I would, because I want you to take the same journey and weave through the story like I did.

Hosseini gives us an amazing story that, with the one act that happens in Kabul, pulls in so many other people in it's wake. I was astounded at the book's end and wistful that I could write like this someday. We're taken from Kabul to the US to France to Greece and all the stories are connected over a span of many decades.

Just beautiful.