Embrace the Grim Reaper by Judy Clemens

I picked this title up while I was checking in new books the other week. A young woman who's only companion is Death. He won't take her but he also won't leave her alone. It is slowly revealed that Casey has lost her husband and infant son in a terrible car wreck. The car company attempts to intimidate her and her family and friends would like her to go for more. So she packs up her backpack and leaves. She seems to have adequate money but she either walks or hitches rides with truckers. She is afraid of cars. When she lands in the small town of Clymer, Ohio she decides to stay for a time. She helps out at a local soup kitchen and discovers that the main employer in town, HomeMaker appliances is closing its door soon and moving its operations to Mexico. But one young, single mother believed that she knew that things would soon be changing. Now it seems that this woman has committed suicide - or was it murder? Casey will decide to find the truth behind all the lies and secrets in this small town and Death will continue to be an annoying, smart mouthed side kick. I'll look forward to the next title. I want to see how the author deals with certain items left from this novel.

Boy Howdy

Dark Horse by Craig Johnson was too short! I keep wanting more from this author and I can't believe that it took me so long to discover him. But, I'm spreading the joy and now my sister is hooked and in turn has gotten her friend in Wyoming hooked.
Walt Longmire is just such a laid back gentleman that I'd love to keep him company. His sense of right and wrong are strong, he and his dog are a great pair and his friend Henry Standing Bear is a gem. In "Dark Horse" Walt has acquired a female prisoner from a neighboring county. She has confessed to killing her husband, but Walt thinks that there is something off. Granted, her husband was a bastard who had set fire to the barn with her horses inside but Walt isn't convinced that she killed him. So he decides to go undercover in the tiny town of Absalom to try and figure out what really happened. This is very near the ranch his parents owned but nearly everybody he knew is gone from there. He makes new friends with a young illegal immigrant woman and her son, as well as the old cowboy who took care of the accused woman's horses. I'm never sure in one of Johnson's book just where things are going or what will be the outcome but it's a wonderful ride getting there.

Back to the Paranormal Realm

Faery Moon by P.R. Frost is the third of the Tess Noncoire books. I stumbled across the first one and it was such a wild premise that I had to keep reading. Tess is a science fiction author. She had lost her husband of three months in a terrible motel fire and in her grief seemed to have lost her way. Somehow she found herself at the Citadel and on her way to becoming a Celestial Blade Warrior, one of those trained to protect our world against demons from other dimensions - I said it was a wild premise! By the third book, she and her mother are at a writer's conference in Las Vegas. Her partner in demon fighting is the unexpected little imp named Scrap. He is a loud-mouthed, cigar chomping, gay little being who can only be seen and heard byTess,and a good thing it is,too. He has a pretty crude way about him, but he is loyal, cunning and can go between dimensions. Las Vegas is not all fun and games for these two - although, Tess's mother, comes into her own as a chantreuse in the hotel lounge. When they go to the most popular show in Vegas - Faery Moon - Tess quickly realizes that the dancers really are faeries and they need to get back to their home before there is a terrible imbalance in all dimensions.
Tess will finally chose between the two men who claim to love her and have her heart broken by a terrible loss. More Tess and Scrap, please.

Lord of Death by Eliot Pattison

The books by Eliot Pattison set in Tibet are some of my favorites. I love the characters and the depictions of the country - although I don't love what the author tells us about what is happening to the country of Tibet and its people.
Shan Tao Yun is Chinese, a former Beijing Investigator who was sent to the Tibetan gulag after he reported corruption in various areas of the government. He learned to love the Buddhist monk who were prisoners with him and now tries to aid the Tibetan people when he can. Right now, that means that he collects the dead from the mountain. His latest assignment brings him to a traffic accident and a double murder.Even though a Western woman dies in his arms, officals deny that there was such a person there. They arrest him for the death of a female Ministry official but then release him and arrest the man who is the prison official in charge of his son.
Soon finding the killer will mean that his son will not be killed or tortured in the "yeti factory" - the local torture hospital.
Shan's mind absorbs minute details and makes connections that others with the same information fail to make. The final outcome is a surprise coupled with a sense of joy.

Flinx Transcendent by Alan Dean Foster

I can't believe that this series started back 1972. I know I read the early ones and quite a few of the later ones but I have a feeling that I missed some. So many years of writing and now he's ending the stories. Or is he? Flinx is on a mission to stop the "Great Evil", something huge that is taking out entire star systems and seems to be moving ever closer to our galaxy. The first part of the book moved very slowly but really speed up during the last third. I, of course, had no clue what most of what was being discussed meant. Science is not my thing, I like the people and the strange beings that inhabit Flinx's world. All loose ends are tied up, all the beings he has encountered are present at some point in the story - including the love of his life, Clarity Held. A big book but I felt it worth my time to read. Now on to Tibet.