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This was so much fun. So, I know (and love) Glen Cook from the Black Company. This is the first time I've ventured out of his dark and gritty stuff and it is so much better. This was such an amazing mix of noir detective story and fantasy tropes that I think I smiled through the entire thing and read it in 2 sittings.

The main character is a PI who takes a simple (at first) job from a bunch of gnomes to go and track down a guy's old flame and get her to appear before the family to either accept the bloke's inheritance or sign off on giving it away.

This turns into a traipse across a warzone, jolly troll hirelings, a vegetarian half-elf killer for hire, a long dead and rotting corpse wiseman, two gnomish femme-fetales, suger high garden fae, centaurs, vampires, city clerks (the most difficult and frustrating of the list) and a ton of other problems. Oh, and the main character used to be the lover of the mark he's been hired to find.

Man... this is what Dresdin tried so hard to be (and succeeded for a time). If you do like Butcher's Harry Dresdin or Harrison's Rachel Morgan then you owe yourself this book. I can't be convinced that Garrett wasn't the inspiration for at least one of them.

OH Lord, what to say. WOD, so much memory tied into you and so much nostalgia that keeps getting trashed. This book has so much going against it: It's rpg fiction which means it is usually written by fans or staff writers. It's an anthology which often means it is hit or miss as well. It's WoD which means it's filled with angst and pseudo-goth diatribes.

This is the first book in a long time that I completely gave up on. I tried to read 4 of the stories and then skimmed another 3. The number of trite tropish non-since is baffling to me at 40+. I know that I was never much into the wider WOD scene back in the day and kind of thought most people who were were a bit.... silly. I loved the system and it has had a huge impact on my gaming life, and I had two really good irl groups who I ran it with. I was also in three major online games (one of my own that had 100+ registered players and 10 STs at one point) and for the most part 60-70% of the players were childish immature idiots who mainly wanted to have cybersex with vampires.

I am sure at some point I would have read this book and thought it was ok, but I've actually read good things since then. Hell, Mack Bolan is better written than most of the stories in this thing.

Oh Heinlein... how complicated my life with you has been.

I wasn't even sure how to rate this one, much like the trouble I have rating any Heinlein book that I have read in the past decade. His stuff just... hasn't aged well. Would I recommend this to anyone? The way I see it, if you haven't read this you fall into one of two camps: 1) You are either Heinlein fan or a fan of this period of science fiction and it's on your list to read, OR 2) You wouldn't be interested in this.

This is not a good book. Even by Heinlein standards this isn't a great book. It's short and I sloughed through it at an extremely rapid pace so I guess that's a merit? There is enough pseudo-psychology/sociology in this thing to drown a grad student. Heinlein loves his pseudo-sociology and he definitely had some ideas about the subject... they just weren't very good ideas and by today's advances they seem head-shakingly misguided.

Then there's the "science" used. I love the pulp and post pulp era of paperback sci-fi so I can ignore bad science as well as anyone out there, but man this one gave me some chuckles. It reminded me of one of my favorite youtube snark move reviewers Brandon Tenold (seriously, if you like mystery science theater check this guy out, he's a step above that in my opinion). I kept thinking throughout this book that Heinlein just threw mumbo-jumbo at the wall. I kept hearing "check the phase-capacitor to see if the neutrinos have been flipped and if so then cross the damn streams" in my head. So much of the this book talks about space travel and physics as if they author really knows what he's talking about but it is all just pseudo-mumble-core claptrap.

So, why read it? Well, once upon a time, I loved Heinlein. Twenty years ago I'd put the book Friday up in my top 5 favorite books of all time. What can I say? I was younger and thought I was supposed to worship the man. Now, I understand the impact he had, and some of his stories are even fun for what they are, but I also now see all of the craziness hiding under the surface too. I read this because I am working through all of my paperbacks and this was at the start of a stack for whatever reason and I thought it would be fun.

It was... for the combined two hours or so it took to read it, and then it was just... a meh aftertaste. I am sure I have it because it's an old beat-up copy that looks like it had a story to tell and I wanted to preserve it and save it from the trash. Do I regret reading it? Not at all, it took two hours to read and I have definitely spent two hours watching worse movies. Would I recommend it? Not in the slightest. If you want to read Heinlein focus on some of his non-Future History stuff.

Paperback 2020 Book #2

Oh lord. Testosterone Harlequin I choose you. For the first two chapters of this book I wondered what I had gotten myself into with this paperback challenge I set myself. I almost gave up on this one and tossed it but decided to just ignore the writing and power through. By the end I was engrossed and staying in my favorite reading spot WAYY too long for the comfort of my legs and backside.

Is this good? Not at all. Is it exactly what the tin says it is? Absolutely. This is pure action escapism and nothing more. It's one of those books you pick up at a truck stop because you know you're going to have some downtime at some point and you need something to read other than your phone screen. I picked it up after it was withdrawn from the paperback rack for purely nostalgic reasons. I was never a huge Mack Bolan fan, but I did have a few similar series that I adored (Endworld, CADS, and Doc Savage mostly). I call them similar not because of setting or genre but because of how they are written and how akin to tinned popcorn they are. They're not the fresh made popcorn of movie theaters, they are the popcorn of christmas gifts from distant relatives... but they still hit the spot when you're really just craving popcorn and nothing better is in the house.

Would I recommend it? Totally. If you know what you are getting into.

I could give a synopsis of the story but... really? They're all the same and if you've read one you've read them all: Mack finds a lead on some really bad guys who are trying to do something really bad. Mack then kills a bunch of people in brutal fashion with skills that no real human could hope to match. Throughout this the book spends pages dedicated to listing exactly what the weapons, gear, and clothing being worn by everyone is. There's likely a girl. She may doublecross Mack or sleep with Mack... or often both. There's this attempt to setup a sense of dread and danger but no reader buys that because we all know Mack can't be beat. Mack single-handedly (maybe he has a helper or two) dispatches the bad guys and saves the world. The end.