Unicorns Can Be Deadly by Charlotte Stuart PhD

This is the fifth book in the Discount Detective Mysteries series, but if this offering is any indication, they can be read as a standalone (and the author did mention this). You can tell there’s been a lot going on earlier in the series, but there are enough clues and updates to prevent confusion and make you want to read the earlier books to get the rest of the story.

Cameron and Yuri are private investigators and partners working for Penny-Wise Investigations. Why does this company have the same name as the Stephen King monster from “It?” Actually, it makes more sense in this context than in the horror novel!

Cameron’s husband died suddenly but not before trashing the family finances. She lives with her mother and two kids and it’s refreshing that they don’t argue constantly! The family unit seems to be a great team. It also seems there’s a great working relationship with Yuri. Of course, private detectives always need a friend on the police department, so we have one of those.

We also have two characters with mysterious backgrounds – friend Gary and Cameron’s boss, P. W., the owner of the agency. You can tell there’s definitely going to be more about these two in upcoming books while the duo tries to figure them out.

The book was an easy read and the plot moved along nicely. The characters did get bogged down on occasion while they tossed theories back and forth, but it wasn’t enough to be distracting. There were several investigations going on at once, but they all tied in together to the point I was thinking if they solved one puzzle, all would be revealed.

There was one aspect that was problematic for me. There are a few instances where legal lines are bent and laws actually broken. After some discussion, it’s pretty much decided that since they did what they did for the right reasons and a worthy cause, it was okay. It’s not like they didn’t realize they were crossing those lines before it happened. There was also a lot of thought given to what to tell their cop friend and how to frame the lies.

On the one hand, the fact that they committed an actual crime to get information on a guy they were suspicious about was pretty ironic. On the other hand? It’s fiction and even real people have plenty of skeletons in their closets!

If I had been able to take a day to read this in one go, that would have been great! I really enjoyed this book and am looking forward to more!

4/5

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

Want to know how to build a clock? Ask Grady Hendrix what time it is! I love these stories but good grief! Get ON with it! At some point I probably wanted to kill each of these characters myself. How often can you repeatedly say the same thing? Pretty often! The only redeeming quality about all the repetition? It helped me keep track of the many, many characters by the way they talked. Way too many characters here.

Even with all that, I love the way this guy writes. In the midst of murder and mayhem, I’m laughing all the way to work.

It took a long time for the plot to reveal itself and make sense. Most of the book is spent trying to figure out if we’ve got an unreliable narrator here. I’m still not sure about that. This nagging question overshadows everything else.

I did like the book and already have a few more on my TBR list. I’ll just have to accept that they’re all a lot longer than they need to be.

4/5

Casino Royale by Iam Fleming

I’ve seen plenty of Bond movies. Not a one of them is based on this book. Sean Connery is not in this book! My expectations were all based on preconceptions of Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Sean Connery.

The main character of this story is 007, but you’ve never met this guy before if you’ve only watched the Bond movies! The plot was confusing. The main story was over half-way through the book. What else is there to talk about? It wasn’t intriguing — it was confusing! The relationships made NO sense at all. Boy meets girl and is ready to propose marriage. Um . . . maybe spend some time together in the real world, away from the expensive resort before you go ring shopping?

I’m not going to jump on the “misogynistic objectification of women” band wagon. This book was written in the 1950s and, as such, is only low-hanging fruit not worth getting ones panties in a bunch!

So once you realize that this poor book was a victim of the Bond movies, you can sit back and enjoy the story. I wonder what the reaction was to these cinematic offerings in the 1960s? Were fans of these books thrilled or appalled? I think I’ll need to read #2 in this series to see if the movies just totally ran away with the Bond character or if he does show up, eventually, in Fleming’s writings.

3.5/5

Haunted Houses Creak: A Horror Collection by M. H. Altis

Let’s get this out of the way. I found this book difficult to read. I know some of the words weren’t those intended. For instance, I don’t know what a “spurring boy of only five years old” would be. I even looked it up, to see if there was a definition of “spurring” that I wasn’t familiar with. I didn’t find one. There are some instances of the exact same wording used in a different part of a story to describe a condition or event. Some of the sentence structure was confusing – odd sentence structure or colloquialism. There are some places where it’s quite obvious some editing was done for a sentence and the unwanted remnants remained. A lot of what I found seemed to be simple word processing errors that a spellcheck wouldn’t catch.

5 AM Publishing needs a proofreader and an editor.

This is a book of short stories, so character development needs to be done quickly. The introduction of the group of friends in “Phantoms of Eternity: Haunted House” was interesting. Ages weren’t mentioned, or if they were I missed it. Initially they sounded like a bunch of high school kids, but then Sophia is described as having a visible scar from breast augmentation surgery. Oh! Must be early twenties? College kids? Nope. There’s mention of a new girl who was popular at her old high school. This made me go back and re-read Sophia’s description. Yup, high school girl with a boob job. Is that a thing now? Perhaps!

The boys all have a thing for the girls. No surprise there! What was a surprise was one couple, seconds after barely escaping one of the monsters in the house, moving in for a close, romantic moment while they’re still lying on the floor.

I could relate to “The Weeds.” I loved spending my summers in lakes, rivers and creeks but never any body of water that had vegetation in it! This one was definitely creepy!

“The Dog in the Woods” was an interesting story and more fleshed out, but it was also predicable. The ending wasn’t a surprise, though it was sad.

I had high expectations for “The Music Box.” The set up was great. But weird things happened with the telling of this one, too, not the least of which was using a rock to prevent a back door from closing as you couldn’t get back in – it locked automatically. But I couldn’t help wondering why they couldn’t just walk around the building to the front door, which was wide open. The visitors note a lot of inconsistencies in the condition of the place, which should be totally derelict, but is not. That’s never really explained. Also, it had really nothing to do with a music box, other than the fact it was there.

My favorite story was “The Shack.” Very creative use of an empty building and a surprise ending on this one!

All in all, I think the author did achieve the goal of making readers “laugh, cry, roll your eyes and shiver.”

3/5

Textkit

Textkit

Update: March 2025 — Unfortunately, the site won’t load.

When you hit the home page at Textkit.com it looks pretty sad. The site is obviously broken, the image and CSS files having been stored and linked from a rackspacecloud.com account which seems to have expired. The Facebook page is also pretty much dead. But if you go to the forums you’ll see that the community is still thriving. It also seems that the files themselves are still available.

A forum thread addresses the recent absence of the site’s founder, Jeff Tirey, and the need for additional moderators to manage the forums.

As of this writing, the domain registration expires in 2019, so the site may disappear into the InterWebs black hole after that. Though the Internet Archive Wayback Machine frequently saves the site, as usually happens, the downloads aren’t archived. So if you think you might need them in the future, you should probably snag them at your earliest opportunity.

First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston

Finally! A female main character who is not an idiot! Well, unless you count getting stuck in this lifetime situation in the first place as stupid. None of the “I knew something wasn’t right . . .” or “That can’t be what I think it is . . .” and “I was so stupid!” when she goes ahead and makes a wrong turn anyway.

I did figure some of it out, but there were plenty of refreshingly surprising reveals.

Completely unbelievable, but a fun ride. Definitely six stars.

6/5

The Secret Doctrines of Jesus by H. Spencer Lewis

Even though it’s a very short book, I’ve just not been able to continue with it, and I give up. I read The Mystical Life of Jesus and found it fascinating. The writing style was the same and, of course, a lot of secrecy about any sources. “They’re hidden and secret, but we have them.” Okay, fine. Whatever.

But this book didn’t even do that. In this one, it was “we’ll get to that later” and never did.

Life’s too short and the TBR pile too tall!

1/5

Ten Year Reading Plan

This list is based on The Great Books of the Western World edited by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. There were two editions published (in 1954 and 1990) and this is an amalgamation of the reading plans from both of them.

Most of the links are to the Wikipedia articles for the authors and Project Gutenberg for the texts themselves. You should be aware that all Project Gutenberg offerings are in the public domain, which means they’re old! In most cases, it is what it is — these are old books. But in come cases there are much more recent and more readable translations of books that were not originally written in English. You may want to seek those out.

If you are looking for a group, there are many. Unfortunately, a lot of them aren’t active anymore.

The Great Conversation Reading Group started Year 1 in January 2025.

  1. Year One
    Plato: Apology, Crito
    Aristophanes: Clouds, Lysistrata
    Plato: Republic [Book I–II]
    Aristotle: Ethics [Book I]
    Aristotle: Politics [Book I]
    Plutarch: The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans [Lycurgus, Numa Pompilius, Lycurgus and Numa Compared, Alexander, Caesar]
    New Testament: [The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, The Acts of theApostles]
    St. Augustine: Confessions [Book I-VIII]
    Machiavelli: The Prince
    Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel [Book I–II]
    Montaigne: Essays [Of Custom, and That We Should Not Easily Change a Law Received; Of Pedantry; Of the Education of Children; That It Is Folly to Measure Truth and Error by Our Own Capacity; Of Cannibals; That the Relish of Good and Evil Depends in a Great Measure upon the Opinion We Have of Them; Upon Some Verses of Virgil]
    Shakespeare: Hamlet
    Locke: Concerning Civil Government [Second Essay]
    Rousseau: The Social Contract [Book I–II]
    Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [Ch. 15–16]
    The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution of the United States, The Federalist [Numbers 1-10, 15, 31, 47, 51, 68-71]
    Smith: The Wealth of Nations [Introduction—Book I, Ch. 9]
    Marx–Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party
    Tocqueville: Democracy in America [Vol 1, part II ch 6-8]
    Ibsen: The Master Builder
    Schrodinger: What is Life?