The Littlest Cowboy

by Maggie Shayne
Book 1 of The Texas Brands

Rating:  No Rating
Progress:  7% into book

I had a bad feeling about this book after reading the first chapter.  On a whim, I started skimming the rest of the book and found that I probably wouldn't like what came next.  From the short snippets I read here and there, we've got a bunch of cavemen-like alphas, and one irrational TSTL heroine.  There's also a lot of telling instead of showing.

There was one particular scene I decided to read, somewhere mid-book where we find out that there's a very dangerous man out there trying to find the heroine and her baby nephew.  A very dangerous man who might have killed her sister.  A very dangerous man who has resources and other dangerous men working for him.  So what does she do?  She decides that she's just going to go straight home where she lives, all by her lonesome, with a child in tow... where said very dangerous man already knows how to find her, and can just waltz up to her home and snatch the baby... maybe killing her while he's at it.

To be fair, to her, however, at some point in the book, the men all decide together that they need not tell the womenfolk just HOW dangerous this very dangerous man truly is.  They don't need to know.  No need to worry the fragile hearts of the little ladies, right?

......

There's entirely too much testosterone going on in this book for me.  Since when is NOT telling someone how much danger she (or even he) is in a good idea?  Ever?

I've read a lot of crap books lately.  I'm too tired to put up with another one.

I loved Maggie Shayne's Brown and de Luca series and have been hoping for another great from her.  But I suppose sometimes you just cut your losses where you can.  This is an earlier Maggie Shayne work, though, so maybe I should stick with her newer stuff.

I picked this book as one of my Reading Assignment Challenge books, and just as well, it was a Kindle freebie.  So I'm glad I got this book out of the way.

Moving on to something else now!

This book is 390 pages long and 216 of them are the Christine Feehan story.  I realise that there are a lot of deep Feehan fans but I find the stories disturbing, full of consent issues and undermining of strong women. I admit that I read many books where consent and agency are problematic but Feehan seems to push many of my buttons and make me quite cranky. 

Some authors pull you past issues and allow you to keep reading but I just can't with Feehan, my internal editor rears her head and spends the entire story pointing at things that irritate rather than going with the story.  She often creates characters that I like initially and then they fall in love and seem to be undermined and turn from strong to weak and stop being the people I liked.  Which is probably most of what I dislike about Laurel K Hamilton. There's also an amount of "this is what women are really like" subtext that rubs me up the wrong way.

Blaze is about to take on the men who killed her father and rings the number on a card to tell the person on the other side what's about to go down and instead he comes to her to try to persuade her to live, and that she's his mate and then he fails in woo and adulting. Sorry, I tried, it just annoyed me so much every time they talked.

Dead by Twilight by Maggie Shayne starts with some minor slut shaming and then continues into a detective novel with a vampire who has found ways of hiding in the police force and using her night-time skills well and who realises that there is a place and maybe a partner.  I found this a much better story with a lot more agency for everyone.

Cimarron Spirit by Lori Herter did show some inexperience but as a story of an old vampire and an archaeologist trying to choose between safe and dangerous men.  It was a good glimpse of possible better stories.

Well Christine left me with a lot of bad taste in my mouth but Maggie and Lori made up for it. Apart from the minor slut-shaming at the beginning of the story the Maggie Shayne was much better than the Feehan story,  Lori Herter's story was good but showed some beginner issues. 

Must expand on this tomorrow, right now I need to go home.

Ah, Fate, Vampires and consent.

I have issues with a lot of paranormal romance, it's compulsion and fated relationships. They both often lack an element of consent.  If there's nothing that all the crap that has come out recently that makes this an element we can no longer ignore.  

Non-consensual sex is rape, no exceptions, no arguments, no more excuses.  

Some authors do a good job of the fated mates issue but often it removes the ability of the woman (more often than not) to actually consent and I'm really tired of it, it needs to stop, the excuses for rape need to be stopped, they need not to be part of our background noise.  Yes, intellectually we know that this isn't right but the repeated telling of tales that erode that knowledge makes people start to questions the validity of their beliefs. Many of us try to let life flow smoothly around us and disagreeing with what appears to be the majority makes us question our stances.

I can't keep doing this to myself, I have to stop the guilt of finishing reading books where the relationship is making me uncomfortable and where honestly I keep wanting the heroine (and occasionally hero - yes, I'm looking at you Laurel K Hamilton) to dump the MF already.

And why do most vampires behave like spoilt children, surely centuries of life (or even decades) make them have to adult on a regular basis?

Why yes, I have problems with the first story by Christine Feehan, I've had problems with her Carpathian series before where it appears (from the two I struggled through) that she hasn't met a competent female character she couldn't undermine with a relationship and sex.

So I took some time and went through all the books that I have marked 'Read' on my GR, mainly for the Romantic Suspense square--it is my comfort, go-to genre after all.  But along the way, I found some books I'd like to list as possibilities for other squares as well.

I'm a wimp when it comes to horror, but imagine my surprise when I found how many books I've already read that could be considered horror--either because tagged at GR, or because they just seem to have horror elements.

Anyway...

I've got lists of books to recommend for Romantic Suspense, but I'm going to narrow it down to books I've personally enjoyed, that also might have a bit of a dark, gritty, chilling atmosphere.

First of all, I would recommend anything written by Laura Griffin--her murder mysteries are pretty gritty, and her characters are tough and great to follow.  Not everything she's written is a murder mystery, and there are a couple military romances slipped into her Tracers series.  But for the most part, I've pretty much enjoyed every books of hers I've read.  I personally like to read books in order if it's a series, but her books can be read out of order or as stand-alones.  Untraceable is the first book in her Tracers series, and some of my personal favorite installments include: Snapped, Twisted, Exposed, Shadow Fall, and Deep Dark.  There's also a stand-alone book called Far Gone that's not bad either.

For a more supernatural experience, I would recommend Kay Hooper's Bishop/Special Crimes Unit series, which follows unit of FBI agents who are all psychic.  The truth is, the first few sub-trilogy arcs are pretty good--the most recent ones are kind of draggy.  I personally liked the first four sub-trilogies, and here are some of my personal favorites:

-- Stealing Shadows, Hiding in the Shadows, Out of the Shadows, Touching Evil, Whisper of Evil, Sense of Evil, Hunting Fear, Chill of Fear, Sleeping Fear.

Hunting Fear has a haunted hotel setting; Stealing Shadows is the first book in the series; Out of the Shadows is the strongest book of the series and has a serial killer.

Kylie Brant's Mindhunter series is also a personal favorite--they can be read as stand-alones as well, but brief references to previous characters will sometimes come up.  

• The first book, Waking Nightmare is not a murder mystery, but a mystery nonetheless with a serial rapist.  
• The second book, Waking Evil has some very subtle paranormal stuff and some significance to do with the woods; also takes place in a small town.
• The third book, Waking the Dead has a serial killer.
• The fourth book is about a kidnapping.
• The fifth book, Deadly Dreams, is my personal favorite, with some paranormal stuff, and a serial arsonist/killer.
• The sixth book is my least favorite, but involves murder.

Cynthia Eden has a trilogy called Deadly that involves teams from a special FBI violent crimes unit.  All three books feature a serial killer, and the first book takes place in a small town:  Deadly Fear, Deadly Heat, Deadly Lies.

Leslie A. Kelly wrote two series I personally enjoyed a lot:  Black CATs and Extrasensory Agents.

Black CATs follows an FBI team that specializes in cyber crimes, and all three books involve a serial killer.  The first book takes place in a small town:  Fade to Black, Pitch Black, Black at Heart.

Extrasensory Agents follows a group of psychic paranormal investigators, so these books may apply to the 'Amateur Sleuth' square as well as 'Supernatural.'  The first and third books take place in a small town.  Cold Sight, Cold Touch, Cold Memory.

I would also like to mention Maggie Shayne's Brown and de Luca series, which was phenomenal!  The first book is called Sleep with the Lights On, and follows Rachel de Luca who, after a corneal transplant, begins to see visions of people being murdered.  So this book would work for the 'Serial/Spree Killer' square, the 'Supernatural' square, and 'Amateur Sleuth' square, since Rachel is a book author.

A non-series book I would recommend is Maggie Shayne's The Gingerbread Man, which really just works for 'Romantic Suspense' and 'Terror in a Small Town.'

I wish I had more stand-alone books to recommend, but it looks like I've mainly been reading series books.  Some other romantic suspense authors I would suggest, however, would be Nora Roberts (duh) and Jayne Ann Krentz and Linda Howard.

 I don't read as many Cozy Mysteries as MbD does, but I DO have a couple particular cozy series I happened to like:

Heather Wells by Meg Cabot -- the first book is Size 12 Is Not Fat

Lucy Valentine by Heather Webber -- the first book is Truly, Madly

Both series are five books long and very enjoyable.

I'm personally planning on reading either the Crocodile on the Sandbank or The Camelot Caper, both books by Elizabeth Peters.  If the library happens to pick up one of my book recommendations before the game ends, I've also requested Devil May Care and The Jackal's Head... which will mean I'll have too many books to choose from...

This book has probably already been mentioned, as it will fit for several other squares, but I read The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (actually listened to it as a full-cast audio), and absolutely loved it.  There's murder, ghosts, supernatural... so many possibilities!

Meanwhile, I'm also going to recommend The Dollhouse Murders by Betty Ren Wright, which is a children's ghost story, involving, well, the titular haunted dollhouse.  I read this when I was in middle school and it scared the crap out of me... but I'm a weenie, so that means nothing.

The Ghost Bride is also an excellent book for these two squares, but like The Graveyard Book, it can fit in several other squares as well:  Supernatural, Magical Realism, Chilling Children, Terrifying Women, Diverse Voices... and if the Ox-Headed Patrol Guards from the Underworld count as Monsters, then it can go in that square as well.  And at the risk of giving away some of the end of book stuff, there's a mythological creature in there somewhere too.

Phantom Evil is the first book in Heather Graham's Krewe of Hunters, another series about paranormal law enforcement in the FBI--a bunch of psychics are gathered into a team to investigate murders that might involve ghostly happenings or a haunted house.

I didn't think I'd have anything to contribute to this square, but apparently I've read enough Amanda Quick historical romance/mysteries to have a few recommendations!

'Til Death Do Us Part, The River Knows, Wait Until Midnight, and any of her Arcane Society historical novels would go in this square.  The Arcane Society books also count for 'Supernatural.'  

I consider Deanna Raybourn's books all 'Gothic', though some of them would also fit into the 'Darkest London' square.  I think Silent in the Grave, The Dark Enquiry, and her Veronica Speedwell books all take place in London.  All the books from both Lady Julia Grey and Veronica Speedwell would count towards 'Amateur Sleuth' as well.

• Julia Grey series:  Silent in the Grave, Silent in the Sanctuary, Silent on the Moor, The Dark Road to Darjeeling, and The Dark Enquiry
• Veronica Speedwell series:  A Curious Beginning and A Perilous Undertaking

Amanda Stevens' The Graveyard Queen is another great series, considered Gothic, with ghosts and hauntings and murder and mayhem.  I've only read the first three books, but recently learned that there are now six total.  The first book is The Restorer, and while this book would also fit the 'Romantic Suspense' square, there really isn't a whole lot of romance in it.  I would even consider this series to be 'horror' as well.  The second book, The Kingdom, takes place in a small town.

I've only got one author I can think of to recommend for this square: Juliet Marillier.  She loves to use a forest or woods as her setting for a lot of books.  For instance, her young adult high fantasy series, the Shadowfell trilogy (Shadowfell, Raven Flight, The Calling) involve a lot of travel back and forth a forest, and there are fairy creatures significant to the forest.

Moonlight has already mentioned Daughter of the Forest in a previous post, a book that I've been meaning to read forever now, and has been sitting on my bookshelf for at least three years.

Another young adult fantasy by Marillier is Wildwood Dancing, which involves anything from the supernatural, to talking frogs, to vampires, to a Gothic setting in a Transylvanian castle, to a significant forest with fairy creatures and a witch named Draguta.

***

Now that I've rambled on forever, I'm going to hop on over to Murder by Death's Halloween Bingo reading lists and put some of these suggestions there.  This post had been started mainly for the 'Romantic Suspense' square, and there are a lot of other Rom-suspense books I would recommend, but I wanted to focus more on the murder mysteries if I could.

If anyone has missed it, here is a link to MbD's compiled list of links to the Halloween Bingo reading lists.