BONE SHOP by T.A. Pratt

Crime boss. Sorcerer. Badass. Eventually.

 

A prequel novel about sorcerer Marla Mason, heroine of a series of novels by T.A. Pratt published by Bantam Spectra from 2007-2009, including Blood Engines, Poison Sleep, Dead Reign, and Spell Games.

Bone Shop explores Marla's early days in the city of Felport and her rise to power. Originally serialized online from June-October 2009, available as an e-book for the first time.

After reading Blood Engines last week, I was looking forward to getting stuck into more Marla Mason stories. I've already ordered the paperbacks of the next three books, but found this prequel for free at the author's website and got hooked right away.

This is an excellent origin story.

It starts when Marla is sixteen and has recently arrived in the city of Felport after escaping a rough childhood. In this city she meets Jenny and they become friends, which soon leads her to the seemingly pervy Artie. But Artie isn't what he seems, and before long Marla gets swept away in a hidden world of magic, sorcerers, and mayhem. It also covers her rise to the top and why she seems so detached when it comes to relationships. Oh, and we find out why she was so close to Lao Tsung, which was very cool!

I found her love story with Daniel touching, and heartbreaking. Not to mention how cool it was to read about when she found the cloak (or did the cloak find her?) and first discovered what it could do when she met a young boy called Rondeau.

Yeah, this is an excellent short novel that just makes me want to read more and more Marla stories. She's an interesting and mysterious character, so it was awesome to read about some of the things that shape the tough woman she becomes.

I loved it!

BTW, if you're interested in checking it out, you can HERE.

THE LOST ART OF WORLD DOMINATION by Derek Landy

A shot of Skulduggery action for free. It isn't easy to take over the world. First you need the scheme. Then you need the muscle. Then you need to come up with a system for ruling six billion people and keeping them fron revolting. It takes a certain kind of man to take over the world. Scaramouch Van Dreg, however, is not that man. But he has one thing going for him. He has his arch enemy, Skulduggery Pleasant, chained in his dungeon, and the only person who is coming to save him is the skeleton detective's 13 year old sidekick. What could possibly go wrong?

 

 

This is a series that I've really fallen behind on, but my daughter's up to the latest book and she keeps telling me to catch up. LOL. So I decided to get back into it with this in-between-the-novels short story.

Scaramouch Van Dreg has Skulduggery Pleasant just where he wants him--chained up inside a dungeon. He's convinced he's the baddest of Pleasant's archenemies, but as he soon finds out... he's way off.

OMG. This shortie was a lot of fun! Really funny. Oh, and every time I read the name Scaramouch, I expected him to do the Fandango. ;)

HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET by Lily Blake

Seeking a fresh start, newly divorced Sarah and her daughter Elissa find the house of their dreams in a small, upscale, rural town. But when startling and unexplainable events begin to happen, Sarah and Elissa learn the town is in the shadows of a chilling secret.

 

Years earlier, in the house next door, a daughter killed her parents in their beds and disappeared - leaving only a brother, Ryan, as the sole survivor.

 

Against Sarah's wishes, Elissa begins a relationship with the reclusive Ryan - and the closer they get, the deeper they're all pulled into a mystery more dangerous than they ever imagined.

A few months ago, I really enjoyed reading Lily Blake's Snow White & The Huntsman so I was looking forward to getting stuck into this book.

Elissa Cassidy and her mother Sarah have moved to a new place away from the pressures of the city. Their new house is pretty big for the two of them and the only reason they can afford it is because the house across the way has a horrible history attached to it. The teenage girl who lived there was brain damaged and killed her parents. No one knows exactly what happened to Carrie Anne that night, but her disappearance has become a local urban legend.

Now, Carrie Anne's brother Ryan lives in the house all by himself and is ostracized from the community because of his family's dark legacy.

Elissa doesn't like the way the stuck up neighbours dismiss the poor guy because of something he had no control over. Especially when she finally meets him the night the 'cool kids' turn out to be anything but. In spite of her mother's objections she slowly develops a friendship with Ryan, who seems rather shy and sweet. Even if he does act a little strange sometimes and confuses the hell out of Elissa with his mood swings.

As Elissa and Ryan get closer, she starts to uncover the awful and very dark secret at the heart of the Jacobsen house. Something that will change her life forever...

I was hooked instantly, so engrossed that I didn't want to put it down. It's very well written, the characters are interesting, and it's got quite a few messed up surprises. But what I enjoyed the most was the heart of the story--the troubled relationship between mother and daughter.

Elissa's a strong and stubborn teenager determined not to be prejudice and very much determined to be rebellious, which gets her into a whole lot of trouble. She's also still suffering from the effects of her father walking out on them and never looking back. Sarah's a mother struggling with finding herself while also raising a daughter after making a bunch of mistakes along the way. They both want the same thing but neither seems to know how to get there, and I enjoyed their separate journeys coming together in their darkest hour.

House at the End of the Street is a super creepy story with a killer twist. It's quite the page-turner and keeps the reader guessing. It's a great thriller, sprinkled with a good dose of horror-filled tension.

I really enjoyed this book and can't wait to see the movie!

The House at the End of the Street, October 2012, ISBN 9781907411991, Atom

The internet's finally back!!

OMG. I can't believe it's back.

 

We've had a HUGE problem with our internet connection since early last Friday morning. We woke up, hubby noticed it wasn't working and it didn't come back until yesterday. That's 6 DAYS! Yep, 6 days without home internet access is enough to piss anyone off. Severely. :/

 

I have to say that the worst thing about it was the awful experience we had with our internet provider. In case you're wondering, we're with Telstra and their customer service is shockingly bad. I mean, I called them on the Friday morning, when the problem first happened, and got no answers. They even promised to call me back and didn't even log that on their system. On that day we ended up calling about 4 times and eventually found out there was an outage in our area. No one had answers about anything, though.

 

Then on Saturday night I found out the outage had been fixed--because I was complaining about the probs we were having on Twitter and someone decided to respond--but surprise, surprise our internet still wasn't back. By this stage, we were feeling like Loki's pic. It wasn't until Sunday that they FINALLY organised for a technician to come over--on Tuesday. Fast forward to Tuesday--which BTW was our 13th Wedding Anniversary--and the technician comes over and still can't fix the problem. So he had to organise for someone else to check it out at street level, or whatever.

 

He said this would take another 2 days!

 

By this stage I'd given up all hope of getting any sort of connection back by the weekend because it was very obvious that this company has no fucking idea about what they're doing. But when hubby got home from work last night and took a look at the modem--ta-da, it was miraculously working.

Once again, another WTF? moment.

 

So, the internet is back. Finally.

 

And what did I learn from this experience? Well, a few things:

 

• Telstra is hopeless and has no sense of customer service,
• Trying to get any answers proved that outsourcing call centres overseas does NOT work,
• Telstra is hopeless and doesn't care about its customers,
• No one should mess with our internet connection EVER, and
• Our smartphones--Samsung Galaxy Note (mine), Samsung Galaxy S3 (hubby)--are lifesavers.

 

I'm terribly disappointed with the way we were treated by Telstra/BigPond. No one had answers, they didn't want to accept responsibility, and just didn't seem to care. I know we're just one customer out of millions, but I think every single account deserves care and attention when something goes wrong. The error was on their end yet the only advice they had was "reboot your modem". The problem had nothing to do with the modem and everything to do with whatever the hell happened in our area last Friday.

 

Although the internet's back and I've spent most of today trying to catch up on things, I'm still very angry about the shitty experience. We plan to let them know.

But anyway. Enough about the horrid ordeal.

Other things have happened too...

My daughter got home from her school camp in the snow last Friday night. She arrived exhausted and sick--both of the homesick variety and the physical kind. It took her several days to recover from the sheer exhaustion and she's feeling a lot better now. I'm glad she's got this week and next week off school. Think she needs the time to take a breather.

It's good to have her home. We really missed her.

Oh, and I reached the end of Sierra Fox #3 on Monday. The final stats were: 95,123w/243pgs. So the third draft is now done. There's just one thing left for me to do, and that's read it on my phone to make sure there are no last-minute typos. Plus I need to write a synopsis. Okay, that's two things. But I don't think I'll be tackling them this week.

I also have a new Samsung laptop. It's awesome. Shiny, too. But I'll talk more about that another day, because I think this catch-up post is long enough. ;)

See ya later!

BLOOD ENGINES by T.A. Pratt

Meet Marla Mason–smart, saucy, slightly wicked witch of the East Coast.…
Sorcerer Marla Mason, small-time guardian of the city of Felport, has a big problem. A rival is preparing a powerful spell that could end Marla’s life–and, even worse, wreck her city. Marla’s only chance of survival is to boost her powers with the Cornerstone, a magical artifact hidden somewhere in San Francisco. But when she arrives there, Marla finds that the quest isn’t going to be quite as cut-and-dried as she expected…and that some of the people she needs to talk to are dead. It seems that San Francisco’s top sorcerers are having troubles of their own–a mysterious assailant has the city’s magical community in a panic, and the local talent is being (gruesomely) picked off one by one.

With her partner-in-crime, Rondeau, Marla is soon racing against time through San Francisco’s alien streets, dodging poisonous frogs, murderous hummingbirds, cannibals, and a nasty vibe from the local witchery, who suspect that Marla herself may be behind the recent murders. And if Marla doesn’t figure out who is killing the city’s finest in time, she’ll be in danger of becoming a magical statistic herself...

 

 

The other day while looking through my PDFs, I found this book. I remember getting this copy a while ago and now that I have my Samsung Galaxy Note, I decided to check it out... and I was hooked instantly.

Marla Mason is a kick-ass sorcerer who runs the city of Felport. But someone wants her dead and the only way she can save herself is by going to San Francisco to find the Cornerstone, which is the only thing that will strengthen her counter spell.

So she finds herself in a place she doesn't even like. Luckily her assistant Rondeau knows all about San Fran.

However, as soon as they get there, Marla starts making enemies. And before too long finds herself trying to save a city that isn't hers from an Aztec threat, because it's also the only way she can save her own life...

I absolutely LOVED this book. It's action-packed, filled with weird and wonderful sorcery, ancient scary threats, a unique magic world, and awesome characters. It was wicked fun!

Marla's an intriguing heroine with an attitude, and I loved her. The secondary characters were also very cool.

Can't wait to read more of Marla's books!