A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill is the first of the Simon Serrailler mysteries.  Hill has written countless other books of fiction, non-fiction and a few children's books in addition to the Serrailler mysteries.  This is the first book by Hill that I've read.  Before I go on, I have a confession to make.  About halfway through the book in the midst of a (failed) quest to find the proper pronunciation of the surname Serrailler (I hate it when there are words or names with ambiguous or unclear pronunciations in a book!) I read a spoiler regarding a central character's fate, and it nearly spoiled the entire book for me, and for a split second I considered ditching the book entirely.  However, denial is a wonderful thing sometimes, and then the next girl went missing, and the story picked up immediately with this development, and I decided I had to finish it because I had to know who the culprit was and maybe that really bad thing doesn't really happen to...

Melissa Senate is a well established novelist apparently.  She's had at least one novel adapted for a TV movie on the ABC Family channel.   The Love Goddess' Cooking School is not her first novel--it is her TENTH!  But for the fact that the text of the novel itself is rife with typos throughout the entire book, one would think that it is a debut.  There are missing words, words in the wrong form, etc.  For whatever reason this book had a crap copy editor and the mistakes kind of take a little away from the story. They're just enough of a distraction when they pop up that they pull the reader out of the story a little bit because you have to go back and read it again to make sure that yes, that really is a typo, and then you have to go back and read it again to figure out what that typo should be corrected to.  It's a shame because it's a charming story, and I enjoyed reading it, except for all the typos. When Holly's 16, her Italian grandmother, Camill...

Since I finished The Everafter I've had a bit of trouble finding a book that I like enough and that catches enough of my interest to want to finish it.  I've started a book, read fifty pages or read over a hundred pages, and decided that no, it just isn't worth it, and I don't really care to finish it, so I don't.  I've gone through several books this way: starting them only to never finish them.  I'm hoping that Evenfall by Liz Michalski is the end of that spell because, Lord, that is no fun at all.   Evenfall is the debut novel of Michalski.  It's a novel that drips in regret--that is, two of its main characters' lives are steeped in it, and the third main character is 'thisclose' to heading that way if she doesn't open up her eyes, see what's in front of her, grow a pair and kick that two timing, money grubbing lover to the curb real fast. Evenfall 's chapters rotate among three perspectives. Frank, the recently dead bel...