People have been saying for years how hilarious the Jodi Taylor books are - both the Chronicles of St. Mary's AND the Time Police series. But Killing People have been saying for years how hilarious the Jodi Taylor books are - both the Chronicles of St. Mary's AND the Time Police series. But Killing Time was the first laugh-out-loud-uncontrollably book in either series for me. I absolutely loved this one!!
The MacGuffin in Killing Time is an out-of-control steam engine train with a malicious mind of its own. And it is jumping randomly through Time. The only good thing is that the Time Police have in their favor is that they have all of the recorded sightings, going back hundreds of years.
A lot happened in the previous book and in this book, it has yet to be decided whether Team 236 (our protagonists Luke, Jane, & Matthew) will even stay together or be broken up or even if one or more members might be leaving the Time Police entirely.
Come along if you dare for a real roller-coaster of a ride and be prepared to face an out-of-control train which just happens (of course) to have two Team 236 members trapped onboard with the original 1911 passengers!
Highly recommended for all Time Police series fans, time travel fans, and fans of ripping good yarns!...more
I can't say enough about the Right Book at the Right Time!
A new friend recommended Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series to me recently. I hadI can't say enough about the Right Book at the Right Time!
A new friend recommended Gail Carriger's Parasol Protectorate series to me recently. I had, of course, been hearing about this series for years now. Oddly, every time someone had recommended it to me earlier, I had had too many books already stacked up in my TBR pile and I just never gave it a serious look. Fortunately for me, I got another chance!
This time upon recommendation I did what I normally do in these cases, and I go straight to Amazon.com and read the sample chapter.
Wow, this series is PERFECT for me now!
I say "now" because I am enjoying this first book Soulless MORE because I have now read more books by authors also writing about werewolves, vampires, ghosts, & other paranormal beings so I now have a good frame of reference for this type of story.
I am beyond thrilled that I have a five-book series to dive into PLUS its various sequels!
I am particularly enjoying the humor in the Parasol Protectorate series and especially the Jane Austen vibe of our heroine's family. Thanks to Pride & Prejudice's Mrs. Bennett and the younger two Bennett daughters, I can now appreciate both protagonist Alexia's family dynamics and the society in which she has to function.
Highly recommended for romance fans, paranormal fantasy fans, Jane Austen fans, fans of strong female protagonists, and series fans! ...more
Gregory Roarke gets by on his wits AND sneaky planning. (By which I mean he takes actions offstage and then rolls the dice and What a satisfying read!
Gregory Roarke gets by on his wits AND sneaky planning. (By which I mean he takes actions offstage and then rolls the dice and hopes for the best.) Icarus Twin is the third book in this series. Icarus Hunt was written back in 1999. Then author Timothy Zahn was able to sell a trilogy to Baen: Icarus Plot, Icarus Twin, & Icarus Job. I was checking Fantastic Fiction today and, to my delight, there was now an additional listing for Icarus Changeling! So, I am a very happy camper!
The Icarus Hunt was Jordan McKell and his alien partner Ixil's book. (Not to worry. Jordan & Ixil appear in the rest of the books, too.) But beginning with Icarus Plot the main characters are Gregory Roarke and HIS alien partner Selene.
Ixil's superpower is that he has two symbionts Pix and Pax. Pix and Pax are about the size of ferrets and intelligent. Smart enough to scout for Ixil and report back exactly what they have seen and heard. Ixil gives them their instructions and then they carry them out.
Selene's superpower is that her sense of smell is at least 1000 times better than ours as humans. She can detect faint smells that humans have no hope of smelling AND she remembers what she smells permanently, no matter how long ago. So, she is a superb tracker, a walking bloodhound.
AND Gregory listens to his dad. Gregory's dad had a pithy aphorism for any and all occasions. I loved them. If you get tired of them, then this series is DEFINITELY not for you! (An example of an aphorism is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it.") In Icarus Twin, a few of the other characters join in the fun and give aphorisms that they imagine Gregory's dad would have said, too!
Suffice it to say, Gregory & Selene (as well as Jordan & Ixil) are in competition with a particular alien race for something they both want very much. Both are on the hunt, and both want to find the prize first! I particularly enjoyed Icarus Twin because Gregory teams up with one of the competitor aliens even though both agree that they are not friends and in fact are in deadly competition. But Gregory has a proposal, and it is in the alien's best interest, for now, to cooperate with him, warily of course.
Highly recommended for great worldbuilding, terrifically developed aliens of all races, the feel of James Bond (including plenty of fast action), and for all Timothy Zahn fans as well as series fans. You could possibly start with Icarus Twin, but I definitely recommend reading Icarus Hunt and Icarus Plot first. And hang on to your hat because Icarus Twin is a great ride!...more
This book fills in the gaps between both the earlier Chronicles of St. Mary's and the Time Police books. Finally, auBook 14 is THE REST OF THE STORY.
This book fills in the gaps between both the earlier Chronicles of St. Mary's and the Time Police books. Finally, author Jodi Taylor has dotted all of the i's and crossed all of the t's for the Chronicles of St. Mary's, clearing the way for her new primary series the Time Police.
Even so, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was just as madcap and tearing around through history (don't call it time travel!) as all of the earlier works. Max is clearly at the heart of the Chronicles of St. Mary's and I am always up for another Max story!
Highly recommended for fans of humorous British time travel, Monty Python, long series fans, and especially fans of the Chronicles of St. Mary's! ...more
This year we get our first Time Police Christmas short story! Author Jodi Taylor has been serving up a short story on Christmas Day for a number of yeThis year we get our first Time Police Christmas short story! Author Jodi Taylor has been serving up a short story on Christmas Day for a number of years now from her long-running Chronicles of St. Mary's series. This year the story is part of the spinoff Time Police series.
The hapless Time Police decide to hold their first-ever Children's Christmas Party. Don't even think about what could go wrong with that! The answer, of course, is PLENTY!
But both series are humorous so be prepared to giggle whilst reading this little gem!
And just when I was sure that the Chronicles of St. Mary's series had ended because the Christmas short story was from the newer series, at the very close of Santa Grint book fourteen in the Chronicles of St. Mary's The Good, The Bad, and The History was announced and is scheduled to be published in June 2023! What an added bonus! :) ...more
Team Weird was just finding their footing as a Time Police team when suddenly everything goes sideways.
Just another day at Time Police Headquarters.
AuTeam Weird was just finding their footing as a Time Police team when suddenly everything goes sideways.
Just another day at Time Police Headquarters.
Author Jodi Taylor wrapped up her long running series Chronicles of St. Mary's after 13 books earlier this year. The Time Police series is a spinoff and favorite characters from St. Mary's still make appearances in this newer series.
The Time Police also have a mega-nemesis (as did the St. Mary's series). Since he is still on the loose, I can only hope for many more Time Police tales yet to come.
Ms. Taylor publishes one book per year with at least one additional short story per year, as well. This year the annual Christmas short story will be a Time Police story for the first time.
Highly recommended for a unique humorous take on time travel, plenty of British humor, and plenty of madcap action!...more
The chickens have come home to roost with a vengeance in A Catalogue of Catastrophe, Chronicles of St. Mary's book 13. During the entire series, our pThe chickens have come home to roost with a vengeance in A Catalogue of Catastrophe, Chronicles of St. Mary's book 13. During the entire series, our protagonist Max has been jumping willy-nilly back and forth in time. Many, many jumps.
Suddenly Max comes unmoored in time. Yes, she is in London but she can see London from several different time periods superimposed on her view. This is what happens if you don't give your body clock a chance to reset itself, a chance to spend some quality time in your OWN time period.
Max had been too busy to think about such things, rushing from one time to the next to save the day or prevent disaster, etc. Now it is all she can think about.
Yes, many other people who work at St. Mary's have also jumped through time over the years but nobody else had made AS MANY trips as Max had.
So, this is the new wrinkle which Max must solve in the latest installment of this terrific series.
Highly recommended for all fans of time travel, especially humorous British time travel tales, and longtime St. Mary's fans. This would not be the best book for a newcomer wanting just to sample this series. ...more
Change can come in the door when you least expect it. I still remember the day I was at the Administrative Offices at some training meeting with referChange can come in the door when you least expect it. I still remember the day I was at the Administrative Offices at some training meeting with reference librarians from every branch in attendance and the speaker started talking about "Who Moved My Cheese?"
Life was never the same at the county public library after that and cheese gets moved in Jodi Taylor's Another Time, Another Place, book twelve in the Chronicles of St. Mary's.
Markham takes his parental leave from St. Mary's (which includes him putting his wife and baby daughter in the car and driving off to destinations unknown). Then an army officer shows up and declares that she is St. Mary's new head of the Security Section and that Markham won't be coming back. And her idea of pod assignments involves Security conducting the entire mission, bringing back recordings for the History Dept. to analyze rather than the historians conducting the mission and the Security Section protecting the historians while they do so.
Then the staff are informed that longtime director Dr. Bairstow was, unfortunately, killed in a bad car crash shortly after he drove out of St. Mary's on his way to London. The new director John Treadwell has all kinds of new ideas as to how St. Mary's should operate, in particular how St. Mary's could start trying to pay its own way rather than just do academic research for its sponsoring university.
Some say that the definition of a good series is that the author should write the same book each time, only DIFFERENT. That is, readers want to spend time in that world which they love with their favorite characters and want to have a good adventure each time with differences but not necessarily HUGE differences.
Fortunately, Jodi Taylor is a good enough author that even though St. Mary's appears to be dismantling itself in front of our eyes, we still want to read what happens next because it may all yet still come around right in the end. (Whether by the end of book 12 Another Place, Another Time is another question!)...more
I managed to have a forty-year career as a reference librarian at a county public library branch without ever understanding the difference between a I managed to have a forty-year career as a reference librarian at a county public library branch without ever understanding the difference between a memoir and a biography.
I knew that memoirs were personal stories, as were autobiographies. But I had never read one and so never "got it". Meaning I never understood the difference between the two genres.
Memoirs, it turns out, have more in common with historical fiction and with the movies that proclaim to be "based on a true story".
Memoirs describe what the story FELT LIKE to the person living through this experience. Like historical fiction and the movies "based on a true story", supporting characters in a memoir can be an amalgam of several different people meshed into one character for clarity and story purposes.
I wanted to read Life Takes Wings by Lynn Rippelmeyer because we came from the same generation. She was only a year or so older than me.
I, too, grew up in the 1950's and had the conversation with my mother that, if I didn't get married and needed to be able to support myself, the careers open to women were nursing and teaching. (Librarians were not mentioned during that conversation but could be seen as lumped together with teachers.)
I became a librarian. My sister became a teacher.
I was in a career where most of my fellow librarians were women. But I was very aware that in the 1970's women were entering what had earlier been considered male-only careers.
Ms. Rippelmeyer had to thread the needle to get the flying hours/experience she needed to become an airline pilot before the age of thirty without the path her male counterparts took because the men could join the military and become military pilots. They didn’t need college either to earn their wings.
By the time Ms. Rippelmeyer thought of joining the military (which had produced the pilots being hired by the airlines in the 1960's & 1970's), she was 24 and could not devote seven years to the military and still be under 30 when she applied to be an airline pilot. (Age 30 was literally the cutoff age. Over thirty and the airlines would not hire you whether you were a man or a woman.)
Ms. Rippelmeyer is also the ONLY person who was a flight attendant first and literally transferred from the cabin to the cockpit.
It is also true that Ms. Rippelmeyer was a beneficiary of many lucky breaks.
Opportunities became available to her at crucial times. She was able to cobble together both the flying hours and the book learning needed to pass the stringent written FAA exams as a civilian whereas her fellow (male) pilots had all learned to fly as military pilots.
Her career started when she put herself through college. TWA required a four-year college degree to apply to become an airline pilot (which was not necessarily on Ms. Rippelmeyer's radar when she got her degree in English literature and Educational Psychology).
This is the FIRST print book I have read since my disastrous fall in 2018, when I destroyed my right shoulder. I was able to read this book because it was a 245-page trade paperback which was both very engagingly written AND vivid. This book had short chapters with punchy anecdotes that spiced up each chapter and made her book a real page turner!
I had also earlier seen a presentation by Ms. Rippelmeyer about her career as the first woman to fly a Boeing 747 so I knew that she could tell a good story and I really liked the feminist aspect of breaking down gender barriers.
During her recent author reading/book signing, Ms. Rippelmeyer said that her writing teacher had explained that a memoir is about how her experience had FELT as she was living it, not just about the facts.
An autobiography presents an author's life from soup to nuts. That is, from the time the person had been born, that person's childhood and early career, and then whatever events had made that person notable or famous, etc. Like the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
When you write a memoir, you do do research to try to get the facts covered as correct as possible but you may well have to reconstruct conversations which had not been written down at the time, the same as the author writing a historical fiction book has to do.
A memoir covers a particular period in an author's life, particular experiences, and may in fact jump around rather than just present the tale in strict chronological order.
Ms. Rippelmeyer's book was not published by the usual suspects (traditional publishers such as Simon & Schuster, Harper, etc.). Nor is the book simply self-published. Instead, Ms. Rippelmeyer went with Morgan James, a hybrid between the two extremes of traditional publishing & outright self-publishing.
In fact, she was advised that she was really writing TWO books. The first goes through her time as a flight attendant and when she first became an airline pilot. The second explores her airline pilot career and what her life was like as she realized her longtime dream of flying commercial jets for a living!
Highly recommended for women who lived through the beginning of women being able to take their places in male-dominated careers and for those 21st Century women who wanted to know how it all started for women who wanted to break out of the nurses-or-teachers-only career paths for women!
And highly recommended for open-minded men who believe that girls should grow up to be anything that they wanted to be, just like their brothers do. ...more
Another fine short story in the grand St. Mary's tradition! And, of course, another fine mess for Max to sort out!
Major Guthrie is leaving after many Another fine short story in the grand St. Mary's tradition! And, of course, another fine mess for Max to sort out!
Major Guthrie is leaving after many years of faithful service. This is his final jump. And he has chosen the Battle of Bannockburn (medieval Scotland). What could go wrong?
Again, this is highly recommended for longtime Chronicles of St. Mary's series readers! ...more
Zylar and Beryl are ideal protagonists in this unusual alien romance. He has chitin. She has hair. But they have an honest relationship, all too rare Zylar and Beryl are ideal protagonists in this unusual alien romance. He has chitin. She has hair. But they have an honest relationship, all too rare even when both are the same species.
Zylar abducts Beryl by mistake (he had landed on the wrong planet) thinking that Beryl was the alien he had been exchanging messages with, but had never actually met, on the alien analogue of Tindr.
Zylar needed a partner (not necessarily his species) to enter the Choosing, his species' Hunger Games-like competition which controlled who was (and was not) allowed to mate. Having failed repeatedly in earlier attempts, an out-species mating was Zylar's last chance.
Beryl's only friend/family was the young dog she had recently adopted. She had a dead-end job and no prospects on Earth. So Beryl, too, welcomed the Choosing as her last chance at happiness as well.
Highly recommended as a smart, funny, delightful read! This is the first book in the Galactic Love series. I can't wait to read book two! ...more
This latest Peter Grant book is a special treat for fellow British author Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" fans from British author BThis latest Peter Grant book is a special treat for fellow British author Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" fans from British author Ben Aaronovitch!
After Peter's last adventure in Lies Sleeping (Rivers of London book 7), he found himself on suspension from his job with the Metropolitan Police. And pregnant girlfriend Beverly also asked Peter to quit his police career.
In False Value (Rivers of London book 8), Peter takes a job at the Serious Cybernetics Corporation, a new tech startup corporation founded by a former Silicon Valley tech genius now based in London.
Needless to say, Peter has his hands full with his first non-police job in too many years plus impending fatherhood!
Highly recommended for all urban fantasy fans, all series fans, and all fans of books set in the London, England area!...more
What a delightful collection of short fiction, from the really brief flash fiction to full short stories!
The stories range from hard science fiction tWhat a delightful collection of short fiction, from the really brief flash fiction to full short stories!
The stories range from hard science fiction to murder mystery to general mayhem to fantasy, etc. A personal favorite of mine was the title prize fight between the nuns and the librarians! My second favorite was a new take on the dragon, the fair maiden, and the knight fairy tale.
Not to be missed are the introductions to each story.
These were stories sold to various publications over the years. I enjoyed finding out where each story had appeared originally, as there were so many different places.
Highly recommended for multi-genre fans and people who just enjoy short fiction!...more
Yes, this is a Rivers of London series novella but the protagonist is German practitioner Tobias Winter.
This novella has many of the same elements asYes, this is a Rivers of London series novella but the protagonist is German practitioner Tobias Winter.
This novella has many of the same elements as a Peter Grant book, but, alas, not Peter Grant himself.
It made me appreciate Peter more and I'm very much looking forward to his next adventure False Value due out in November 2019.
That said, I did enjoy seeing what this world looks like from the German perspective. In that regard, it did help tide me over until the next Peter Grant book. Recommended for diehard Rivers of London series fans!
What a fun story! Every year Jodi Taylor writes a short story set at Christmas. St. Mary's has a tradition where each Christmas Max & the gang take anWhat a fun story! Every year Jodi Taylor writes a short story set at Christmas. St. Mary's has a tradition where each Christmas Max & the gang take an irresponsible Christmas pod jump, just to let off steam, after a year of doing their best to stick to the boring rules of time travel.
They outdid themselves this year! Not only did they take a jump "just for the fun of it" but they jumped a pod to Mars! (To see the first human landing on the Red Planet in contemporary time, of course.)
Plus, this was not really a Max story. Rather, it was the story of another St. Mary's from another reality (in which humans had landed some years ago on Mars) which simply invited Max & one colleague along for the ride. That was really cool. So, we got to follow along with another crew as its hapless director is trying to explain the exploit afterwards to no less than the dreaded Time Police!
The other St. Mary's director is trying to sell the Time Police director on how fabulous pod jumping could be for the space program. No more having to spend months in transit or risk dangerous rocket travel. Instead, you could settle any planet, go anywhere quickly and easily via reliable pod travel. (Well, we all know how "reliable" pod travel is, right?)
Anyway, this story is a hoot and most definitely not to be missed. Highly recommended for a hilarious adventure even if we only see two of our usual regular St. Mary's characters! ...more
