Challenges

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (replaced The Monsters of Templeton for the US for Orbus Terrarum; read for Herding Cats)

Is there really anything left to say about this juggernaut? Suddenly it seems to be everywhere. I don't usually read books because of hype _ four of the Harry Potter books had come out before I read the first one _ but I was very curious about this after having seen it all over the place.
Now, I'm 37, so I admit I'm not really the target audience for Twilight. Having said that, I did like it. I didn't love it, but I did like it. I liked Bella; I liked the fact she's not portrayed as a typical teenager, and she's original and quirkly.
Sorry, but I couldn't stand Edward. That moodiness would have been enough to make me smack him upside of the head. I can't be doing with moody men. And the endless description of the weather in Forks. I get that the vampires live there because it's cloudy and rainy most of the time and they sparkle (literally) in the sun but did we need to be reminded over and over and over again of it? Really?
Apart from that, I liked Edward's family. I liked the sense of this group of outsiders coming together and forming such a strong bond.
Some of the action sequences were a bit cliched; especially the Bella-in-danger-in-a-strange town one where Edward "just happens" to save her.
So Twilight _ good, but not great.

Orbus Terrarum

This is part of the Orbus Terrarum challenge; McCullough is from Australia :)



On, Off by Colleen McCullough


It's 1965, and the torsos of young girls have started showing up. They're all about 16, mixed-race girls from close, loving families. This is a time before profiling, before the phrase serial killer has been coined and requires some painstaking work to get to the bottom of it.
That is the job of police detective Carmine Delmonico, who finds himself dealing with an entirely new kind of killer, and he realises he's stumbling around in the dark a lot of the time as he tries to figure out the why of what's happening.
I've read some of the reviews on Amazon that were pretty condemning, but I really liked On, Off. I liked the way it laid the groundwork for Delmonico as he works out how to find this new kind of killer, and the reveal wasn't a big "boom" but a logical progression. Not to say there wasn't a boom _ there was, right at the end of the book.


It was easy to read, and refreshing, quite frankly, to read a detective novel that didn't throw a male/female team together who start out hating each other yadda yadda yadda ....
Delmonico is a likable leading man and I'd be happy if there were a whole series of books featuring him.