I can't do it. This book has no quotation marks for dialogue and has already had quite a bit of dialogue in the short amount I've read. I have no desire to spend the entire book trying to sort out which parts are being spoken and which parts aren't when this all could have been solved with proper punctuation. Reading an extended conversation that had non-dialogue bits thrown in throughout it was frustrating. The lack of quotation marks is just incredibly distracting. The only way I could do this is if I did it on audio so I didn't have to look at the text.

I quit at a fourth of the way through it. I was just so bored with it, even listening to it. I've gone to one of his talks on this very subject years ago and it was interesting and engaging. This book was neither of those things. Even as short as it was, I wasn't willing to push through the rest. And some of his asides felt a bit mean-spirited and condescending. After I decided I was done, I skimmed my physical copy and one section near the end that I noticed in particular gave me those vibes. That was another thing I never got from his talk, so this was really disappointing. Then again, the author had been disappointing in real life in the past year or so, so perhaps I'm just noticing things I wouldn't have before.

DNF at 1/4 of the book.

Welp. That’s it for Jocelyn O’Roarke. I’m not hiding any spoilers, so proceed at your own risk.

The series ends with Josh’s New York theater career once again possibly ruined by her involvement in a murder case. Because even though Dentinger came up with some new ideas for the plot, I guess she couldn’t help repeating herself a little bit. Honestly, though, after that denouement I can’t help thinking Josh deserves to be permanently blackballed. It was so mind-numbingly stupid and unnecessary and downright cruel. If you’re as unconcerned for an epileptic’s well-being as Josh obviously is and you’re trying to prove that the murderer used a strobing music box to induce a seizure so the epileptic wouldn’t realize he’d left the room to do the deed, would you do the logical (but cruel and ruthless) thing and expose the epileptic to the strobing music box too see if it really has the desired effect, or would you hijack a curtain call in a full theater and con the director into using a mirror ball and flashing lights and bribe the conductor into changing the score to play the same song as the strobing music box and hope all this somehow induces not only a seizure, but a full confession? I can’t help thinking even Dentinger knew how stupid this was, as she pulled back to the POVs of the people in the lighting control booth so as to distance herself and us as much as possible from the depraved idiocy.

To add insult to injury, nothing was resolved in the will-they-won’t-they-who-will-she-choose annoying love triangle. I actually wish it was a REAL love triangle and that Jack and Phil decided to hook up and ditch Jocelyn and go solve crimes and raise horses together in California. You know what? I’m just going to tell myself that’s what happened after the last scene in the book. I’ll be happier that way.

(Read for Halloween Bingo Murder Most Foul Square)

I'm quitting this one at a little over 40 pages in. It's supposed to have 3 different perspectives, but I've only had one character's POV (Coop) so far. I do not like him. He has a best friend, Jupiter, a lesbian he's in love with and not-so-secretly hoping will decide she likes guys and get with him. He's creepy and possessive toward her, getting jealous whenever she pays attention to someone other than him.

I read some spoiler reviews to see if things would get better since I really enjoyed this author's previous book and was hoping things would get better if I pushed through to the two girls' sections. I did not like what I read. At all. The book was not going to be going in a direction I liked. And I apparently had multiple moments of unchecked biphobia to look forward to as well. I'm just not in the mood for that, so I'm calling it quits. I appreciate the idea behind this one, but the book just isn't working for me.

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!