Caden O'Brien's Website

Bet You Can’t Own Just One !

Why own a dog ? There’s a danger you know,
You can’t own just one, for the craving will grow.

There’s no doubt they’re addictive, wherein lies the danger,
While living with lots, you’ll grow poorer and stranger.

One dog is no trouble, and two are so funny,
The third one is easy, the fourth one’s a honey.

The fifth one delightful, the sixth one’s a breeze,
You find you can live with a houseful with ease.

So how ’bout another ? Would you really dare ?
They’re really quite easy but oh, Lord the hair !

With dogs on the sofa and dogs on the bed,
And crates in the kitchen, it’s no bother you’ve said.

They’re really no trouble, their manners are great,
What’s just one more dog and just one more crate ?

The sofa is hairy, the windows are crusty,
The floor is all footprints, the furniture dusty.

The housekeeping suffers, but what do you care ?
Who minds a few noseprints and a little more hair ?

So let’s keep a puppy, you can always find room,
And a little more time for the dust cloth and broom.

There’s hardly a limit to the dogs you can add,
The thought of a cutback sure makes you sad.

Each one is so special, so useful, so funny,
The vet, the food bill grows larger, you owe money.

Your folks never visit, few friends come to stay,
Except other dog folks, who all live the same way.

Your lawn has now died, and your shrubs are dead too,
But your weekends are busy, you’re off with your crew.

There’s dog food and vitamins, training and shots,
And entries and travel and motels which cost lots.

Is it worth it, you wonder ? Are you caught in a trap ?
Then that favorite dog comes and climbs in your lap.

His look says you’re special and you know that you will
Keep all of the critters in spite of the bill.

Some just for showing and some just to breed,
And some just for loving, they all fill a need.

But winter’s a hassle, the dogs hate it too,
But they must have their walks though they’re numb and you’re blue.

Late evening is awful, you scream and you shout
At the dogs on the sofa who refuse to go out.

The dogs and the dog shows, the travel, the thrills,
The work and the worry, the pressure, the bills.

The whole thing seems worth it, the dogs are your life,
They’re charming and funny and offset the strife.

Your lifestyle has changed. Things won’t be the same,
Yes, those dogs are addictive and so is the dog game !!

–Author unknown

First of all, I want to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas! I’m a little late, but things have been a bit hectic. Hope you had a day filled with love and family and friends, not to mention lots of good food and a safe amount of libation!

Second, I got a fun piece of good news the other day. As you may have noticed, I’m a member of  LibraryThing.com, which lets you organize, catalog, review, and share your library and wishlists. It’s yet another variant on social websites, geared toward book lovers, librarians, authors and other literati. Called a “social cataloging” site, it’s a lot of fun. One thing they offer is a lottery for new books being released, either by publishers or privately by the authors themselves. They want volunteers to review the books on LibaryThing and other places, and usually there’s a much bigger volunteer list than there are books available. And guess what? I scored a book my first time out! I get a free book, and I’m happy to give it a review even though that’s not a requirement for getting the book. But the more you review, the better your odds are for ‘winning’ a book in the future!

So in the mail is a copy of The Bricklayer: A Novel written by Noah Boyd. Here’s a brief description from Amazon’s site:

… introducing Steve Vail, one of the most charismatic new heroes to come along in thriller fiction in many years. He’s an ex–FBI agent who’s been fired for insubordination but is lured back to the Bureau to work a case that has become more unsolvable—and more deadly—by the hour.

A woman steps out of the shower in her Los Angeles home and is startled by an intruder sitting calmly in her bedroom holding a gun. But she is frozen with fear by what he has to say about the FBI—and what he says he must do. . . .

A young agent slips into the night water off a rocky beach. He’s been instructed to swim to a nearby island to deposit a million dollars demanded by a blackmailer. But his mission is riddled with hazardous tests, as if someone wanted to destroy him rather than collect the money. . . .

Vail has resigned himself to his dismissal and is content with his life as a bricklayer. But the FBI, especially Deputy Assistant Director Kate Bannon, needs help with a shadowy group that has initiated a brilliant extortion plot. The group will keep killing their targets until the agency pays them off, the amount and number of bodies escalating each time the FBI fails. One thing is clear: someone who knows a little too much about the inner workings of the Bureau is very clever —and very angry—and will kill and kill again if it means he can disgrace the FBI.

Steve Vail’s options —and his time to find answers—are swiftly running out.

Looks pretty cool, eh? Can’t wait to read it, and I’ll post the review here too.

What would real people do if they suddenly found themselves turned into vampires or other supernatural beings? Or if they met one of these beings in the course or ordinary or extraordinary events? Ever since I was a kid, I thought “I know these things don’t exist, but what if…?” I like to think of myself as somewhat grounded in reality, but I also have that “but what if” question in the back of my mind. I just really want to believe I guess.

My favorite books tend to be those that walk the edge of fantasy and reality. They deal with ordinary people in the ordinary world, but there’s a twist. Magical and supernatural elements abide alongside the mundane world. You might be an ordinary 9-to-5 person with no special talents, but your boss is a vampire. Or a werewolf pack lives on the edge of town and they run all the security and law enforcement operations. Or the evil government took special forces soldiers, and experimented on them until a variety of psychic talents were enhanced. Having things like this in your life can have a dramatic impact! The stories focus on real people dealing with extraordinary things, and they react much like you or I would do. The fantasy is realistic.

Jeri Smith-Ready does a fabulous job in blending the real with the supernatural. I’ve just read the first two books in her WVMP Series, Wicked Game and Bad to the Bone.

Here’s the storyline from the author’s website:

Recovering con artist Ciara Griffin is trying to live the straight life, even if it means finding a (shudder!) real job. She takes an internship at a local radio station, whose late-night time-warp format features 1940s blues, 60s psychedelia, 80s Goth, and more, all with an uncannily authentic flair. Ciara soon discovers how the DJs maintain their cred: they’re vampires, stuck forever in the eras in which they were turned.

Ciara’s first instinct, as always, is to cut and run. But communications giant Skywave wants to buy WVMP and turn it into just another hit-playing clone. Without the station—and the link it provides to their original Life Times—the vampires would “fade,” becoming little more than mindless ghosts of the past. Suddenly a routine corporate takeover becomes a matter of life and un-death.

Ciara is a tough gal. Twenty-four years old and trying to make it in the legit world by getting a college degree, she was raised by grifter parents who moved every two weeks. Relationships, honesty, and commitment are not part of her psyche. She’s got a dead-eyed cynical view of the world and its inhabitants, supernatural or not. Told from her viewpoint, she is foul-mouthed and funny, and I found myself laughing out loud at many of the situations she found herself in. For example, her first intimate encounter with future-love-interest Shane (a young grunge-era vampire) resulted in him taking a huge chomp out of her thigh, which caused her to viciously kick him in the head with her other leg. His resulting jerk-back causes a lot of flesh-ripping which causes a lot of bleeding, which requires stitches… Shane runs off into the night. Now, in a typical romance book, the assault would have caused her multiple orgasms and an instant bonding to her attacker, who would nobly turn her into a vampire so that they could have mind-blowing sex for eternity. But this isn’t fairy-tale land.

Smith-Ready’s worldbuilding is superb. She poses a unique view of vampire life, and it’s not happy-camperland for the vamps. Yes, they are beautiful, alluring, super-strong, super-fast, and super-sexual. But something bad starts happening after they are created, and it just gets worse as they age: they fade. Over time they become less human, while at the same time the vampiric traits get stronger. If they lose their connection to their Life Time, fading is even faster because they have difficulty connecting to the present time. They can’t learn new things or form real relationships. The world is so confusing to them, they develop obsessive/compulsive behaviors to try to cope with things they can’t control. They become extremely flammable, and they burn like paper (humans burn like wood). Even though they’re technically immortal, the average vamp only lives about 80 years after their turning. It’s heart-rending to see them struggle.

At first Ciara wants nothing to do with these freaks, but because she’s a good person at heart (and she really needs the job) she throws her lot in with the vamps and cooks up a scam, er, plan, to save the radio station and the sanctuary it provides the vamps. She re-brands the station as “The Life-blood of Rock n Roll” and promotes the Vampire DJ angle. Almost no-one believes they’re real, of course, but the campaign is a huge success. Her relationship with Shane is rocky – he’s young enough to be still quite human and he loves her, but she’s afraid of it. As they work through the difficulties, they have the inevitable fading problem hanging over their heads, except they don’t know how fast it will happen or whether Ciara’s efforts to save Shane will help avoid it. In spite of these unique problems, their relationship is like any other couple getting off to a tough start. It’s believable, and because we care about the characters, it pulls at the heartstrings.

The bad guys work hard to destroy the vamps and Ciara too, and there’s good action in both books. These are not strictly romance books, so there’s more character development and action to move the plot along. These books are on my keeper shelf and I can’t wait for the third installment, Bring On The Night, which will be out in August 2010.

Smith-Ready is an obvious musicphile, and the book comes with a lot of playlists of the tunes the DJ’s play. Her website includes a great music player with all the tunes from the books on it, and I was thrilled at how many of them were in my personal library. I also found a lot of tracks that I haven’t heard in years, so I happily added them to my collection.  Great stories and good music totally do it for me. If you also like books and music, check out Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville series. She’s a DJ werewolf, and the books are also realistic fantasy. Rock on!

• Wicked Game
• Bad to the Bone
• Bring on the Night (August 2010)
• tentatively titled Lust for Life (early Spring 2011)

I love a man in uniform…

There’s something about well written stories about Navy SEALS and other non-paranormal supermen that gets my blood racing, and Susan Brockmann’s Troubleshooters Inc. series fits the bill perfectly.

My hat’s off to Ms. Brockmann for the detailed telling of life in the Navy SEALS, and enough detail about the missions they’re on to make it very realistic. Whether it’s 100% accurate or not I don’t know, but the stories are fleshed out enough to be believable and thrilling. The Navy SEALS are an awesome group of guys, and they don’t publicize themselves much so it’s fun to get the scoop on their doin’s through well written fiction.

What do I like about this series? Well, the stories have both action and characters. One without the other is boring. The former will read like to to-do list, and the latter will stagnate into a treatise on navel-gazing if not done well. I like books that combine both.

I like books with hot, smart, and funny guys and I like sex in my books. Nothing like living vicariously! I’m an adult, and I know that adults have sex. I like good romantica and I’m not squeamish. The sex scenes in these books are very well done – romantic and sexy and … oooooh! I love these guys. There is even a story arc with a gay hero (the oh-so-hot Jules Cassidy) that is wonderfully done. Funny about liking a gay hero and rooting for his HEA (happily-ever-after)! Hey, hot is hot. It’s a good story. And tastefully done, for those who may worry that there’s too much raw gayness here. Not so. And no multi-partner sex either, for those who worry about such things.

The dialog is witty. If I can insert a criticism, it would be that Ms. Brockmann’s formula at times is a bit too formulaic… characters tend to have the same off-the-wall sense of humor (which I happen to love, so I can’t possibly OD on it!). But I think she’s put enough variety in her characters to minimize this. Many of the situations and dialog are hilarious at times. Like I said, I love these guys.

There’s lots of “male perspective” in the stories. I like that. It takes two (at least!) to romance, and I like seeing both sides of the story. Ms. Brockmann has an excellent command of the young & hot male viewpoint, and relates their stories with great humor and detail.

All is not hearts and flowers. The trio of Navy Seals, Troubleshooters, and FBI counterterrorist operators deal with some serious shit with terrorists and other psychos. Bad things happen to good people, and its not pretty.  But, it’s realistic.

The storyline is that Navy SEALS Lt. Commander Tom Paoletti, upon leaving the Navy following an injury and political BS that stick him behind a desk, forms a private security and anti-terrorist company called Troubleshooters, Inc. A number of his SEALS join him in his new company, and the SEALS Team 16 continues to work with Tom and his company on various assignments. As do the FBI counterterrorist unit headed by Max Bhagat. Most of the books thus have 3 storylines involving characters from each of these units, plus a number of them also have a “retro” romance from the WWII era involving a grandparent of one of the main characters. There is a threat – to national security, world peace, etc. – that over-arcs the book and results in all kinds of tumult.

The stories are tightly written and the pacing is great. They are hard to put down once you’ve started!

• The Unsung Hero - June 2000
• The Defiant Hero – March 2001
• Over The Edge – September 2001
• Out Of Control – March 2002
• Into The Night – December 2002
• Gone Too Far – July 2003
• Flashpoint – March 2004
• Hot Target – December 2004
• Breaking Point – July 2005
• Into The Storm – August 2006
• Force Of Nature – August 2007
• All Through The Night – October 2007
• Into The Fire – July 2008
• Dark Of Night – January 2009
• Hot Pursuit – July 2009