SNEAKY PIE FOR PRESIDENT by Rita Mae Brown ***

I haven't finished reading yet but I just wanted to get this off my chest before I finish. How on earth can someone justify allowing cats free roam? Even intact dogs? There never is any mention, no social conscience about feral cats, unwanted thousands of kittens by people letting intact cats run free. The cat problem is 100x worse than unwanted dogs. The ferals have a terrible life, they get hit by cars, killed by dogs, eaten by coyotes or foxes, maimed or fatally injured until they die a painful death full of infection and disease. They never have a 'free' meal unless women with no life feed them- some don't even catch and release (altering them) so they can't breed.

There were 3 ferals nearby and I caught all 3 and had them fixed 2 were females. Someone wanted to keep one, I said fine hand over $60 that's what it cost for the spay. NOPE. Wouldn't pay, I didn't give her the cat. The next year, if these females were left intact would have been 8-16 kittens then 32-60 kittens the next year-if each first round of kittens had 2 litters a year of 6 that would be 24 in a year. Imagine the problem, it's HUGE. Rita Mae Brown needs to grow the fk up and address this issue with her readers if they're so hung up on cats and their b.s. stories.

Get a social conscience or stop writing about free roaming cats and intact dogs. And do not tell me this b.s. about how cats stay in their own yard. Neither dogs nor cats have any sense of where your friggin property line is so stuff it. Most wander right down your driveway and decimate the bird populations. Good for you!

The LAST HACK by Christopher Brookmyre **

This one was slightly above 1 star. I couldn't finish it. Too boring and the guy is from England with the crappy English terms I don't care to bother with, it interferes with my reading pleasure. BORING.
Wasn't thrilling for me-says it would be in the cover flap. NOPE.

BLACKOUT by Marc Elsberg *

One star for taking time to write a novel. Bored the shit out of me. There are days to remember as well as cities & countries; Milan, Rome, Ybbs-Persenbeug, Brauweiler, Lindau, Berlin,  Schiphol, Paris, St. Laurent-Nouan,  Calabria, Basilicata, Apulia, Campania, Enel, Sicily,  Colon, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Austria in less than 20 pages: ETC. So good luck with that.

Now lets count people to memorize as you drift off to sleep in 10 pages: Pero Manzan, Gulia, Paola, Valentina Condoto, Guiseppe Santrelli, Herwig Oberstatter, Jochen Pewalski, Sophia Angstrom, Lara Bondoni, Chloe Terbanten, Fleur van Kaalden, Frauke Michelsen, Helge Brockhorst, Holger Rhess, Mr. Badersdorf. There are more after 10 pages I can't bear to go on.

Mostly this is a boring repetitive story about power being hacked and all over the European countries they are going black and nuclear power plants are heating up and people are scared all over and on and on with the power going out descriptions. I DO NOT FUCKING CARE. Just say all over Europe went black and get on with some kind of story line I can happily follow to the end. BUT no such luck.

So there ya go I quit at page 96 it was relentlessly repetitive over and over the same old shit. Good thing I took out 2 books from the library and I hope the next one isn't quite as completely off the charts. It sucked. "More than 2 million copies sold". I bet.

The BEACH HOUSE by James Patterson/De Jonge *****

His stories are always an easy read, A few assumptions I wasn't happy about one was "the break in last summer at our house I figured whoever had caught up with Sammy was looking for the pictures."
HOW THE FK DOES he come up with that out of thin air? Nothing to prove anything in that sentence, just made up spur of the moment.

Aside from characters making assumptions out of thin air I thought the writing was good, characters drawn as well as can be expected (there were a lot of them), he writes in a crisp terse manner with as little frivolity as possible. Good summer read on the beach, heck beach is in the title so go for it.

Patterson has written so many books and adds new writers frequently enough to almost be a ghost writer, trimming other newbies work to a bearable reading size. So I liked it, and if you like Patterson you'll like it too.

THE BROKER by John Grisham ****

Basic storyline: Guy is in jail 6 yrs for (not really positive) trying to sell software that hacks into a Chinese Satellite? The hackers are all dead the guy in jail was put there so the gov't (outgoing pres.) who could care less about him, watch to see who kills him first after pardoning him. The choices are Israelis, the Russians or the Chinese or our own country. I have NO IDEA why all these countries want to kill him. None whatsoever. No one even knows what's on the disks he has, it's all RUMORS about hacking a satellite.

Also this guy's American court lawyer ends up dead too. Joel Backman figures he's next. He also knows the gov't is waiting to see who'll kill him over the disks. He went to jail so he could avoid being killed but now he's tossed into Italy and has tutors teaching him Italian. He meets his second tutor a female and of course we all know 6 lonely years in prison can make the nastiest ugliest female into a princess which Joel decides in  the end to return to.

Mostly a lot of moving around, disguises, trains, walks. Half the time he has no idea he was being followed but he learned to duck into little side streets and find his way home. and loses some followers quite easily.

Pisses me off: what happened to the stolen briefcase? I think I remember it had nothing in it anyway but it's talked about quite a bit. Why would 3 countries who have no idea what he was trying to sell them (I assume) before he went to jail think he had anything they'd want? I don't get that. And I don't get the part where America has his son's house bugged and heard the names of  hotels at the end where he could meet his son YET I don't know which one he didn't mention cuz no one showed up anywhere that I know, even the wrong place. Never wrote that in.

So there some aspects of the novel that obviously needed a better explanation. I did get lost here and there with the idea of 3 countries trying to grab the software they had no idea existed or what it consisted of. I was ticked off 3 hackers were killed before I even knew what they did. I doubt they knew either. I think it was a bit above fair but not by much.