The Gardener, S.A. Bodeen

I have no idea what order I read things in and this one is overdue so it's first.

Mason's mom is always telling him that the company she sort-of works for is evil and he should have nothing to do with it. But he doesn't really buy it until one day he is in the rest home his mom works at and the video his dad made before leaving Mason's family wakes a girl out of her stupor.

Mason and the girl escape the facility and go on a mad race to find out what is going on. What Mason doesn't think is he may have to take her back for her own good.

This book does not make much sense, and the ending is too happy to really believe.

Smoke and Shadows, Tanya Huff

So I got Smoke and Mirrors out of the library, only to find out that it was the second book in a series. I get this one too, and I find out that this series is the sequel to another series, and why don't I just go soak my head.

Oddly enough I have the other series in two paperbacks, sitting in my living room waiting for me to get to them.

ANYway, Tony has kind of left the vampire he was in a relationship with and is working as a PA on a syndicated show about a vampire detective. Ironically, Tony's vampire friend used to do some detecting.

It seems spooky shit is not behind him when Tony finds himself smack-dab in an invasion from another dimension. Shadows are taking over people's bodies and those people are groping Tony a lot.

One person knows what is going on. She's the special effects "wizard," and yup, she's actually a wizard. Groan. She also refuses to do anything to help.

Fun read, different from the other series I've read. I like Huff a lot.

Ghost Country, Patrick Lee

Once again, my knack for picking up sequels did not fail me.

Okay, get this. Somewhere in the US there is a portal from another world, and periodically stuff comes through it. These things can be useful or impossible to figure out. There is of course an organization dedicated to studying these things.

One member of this organization is on her way back from seeing the President about something one of the artifacts showed her when her motorcade is attacked. She is the only prisoner.

So there's a bleak future in store for the US, the president is apparently in on it, and what can we do?

Fun read. I'll probably get the other one.

Nightwatch, Sergei Lukyanenko translated by Andrew Bromfield

So I was doing this horror movie contest (and therefore barely read anything) last month and one of the assignments was "Read a Book Based On, or Inspired By a Horror or Sci-Film, or a Book About the Horror or Sci-Fi Genres."

And I read that wrong and thought I could also read a book a movie was based on. I hear there are some great special effects in this movie with no point. I haven't seen it. That's probably why I thought it was a book about vampires.

So there are good and bad magicians, and the bad magicians work the Day Watch and the good ones the Night Watch. You follow?

Book is the adventures of a low-level good magician as he is manipulated through several adventures. There is rather a lot about bureaucracy in this book, and I wasn't very into it.

Poltergeist, James Kahn

I read this for this horror-movie-watching contest I did last month. It helped that I've never seen the movie, I guess.

A little girl starts talking to the TV set, and then weird shit starts happening around the house, and then the closet eats her.

Smoke and Mirrors, Tanya Huff

So the TV show Tony works on is filming a haunted house scene in an actual haunted house. Except nobody knew that when they got there.

Tony has enough to do with his boss's daughters running all over the place and the guy he has a thing for sending mixed signals, he does not need to start seeing ghosts.

But worse is to come--when the sun goes down most of the crew winds up trapped in the house with a bunch of pissed off ghosts. And the house is trying to get someone to kill so it will have more souls to feed off.

Return to Demon Hall: Evil Roots, Andrew Nance

Okay, so the evil of Demon Hall seems to be defeated, and there shouldn't be a problem with holding a second horror contest.

Of course the evil isn't over.

The plot of this one is way more convoluted than the last, and I didn't find it quite as enjoyable.

Fort Freak

This is a weird sort of anthology novel. Lots of people have superpowers now, and this is about a New York police station in the middle of the action.

The plot, spread out over several stories, is about a retiring cop looking into an old murder, a snake-guy accused of assaulting some cops, and three people combined into one person--their body is constantly in painful flux and one of the personalities has Alzheimer's disease.

Interesting, kind of predicable.

The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot, Thomas Maeder

This went on my library hold list so long ago that I'm not sure why I put it there. It was a fascinating book though, so I guess that doesn't matter.

In the forties, while the Nazis occupied Paris, a doctor would tell people that he was going to get them out of the country. He would take a bunch of their money, have them pack up their valuables, and then kill them. Nobody is sure about what happened to the bodies of most of these people.

Dr. Petiot was only caught because a property he owned was emitting noxious smoke and when it was finally opened there were bodies in the furnace.

There were human remains all over the property, it turned out, and most of them were impossible to identify.

Because it was war, French police weren't eager to catch anyone the Germans were after. That, coupled with the idea that Petiot might have been killing Germans, kept the cops off his trail long enough for him to escape.

This is a hell of an interesting book--not just about a monster, but about complete bureaucratic incompetence.

Bodies in a Bookshop, R.T. Campbell

Max is just shopping for books he can't afford when he finds two dead guys in the back of one store. Soon he is forced to give up his vacation because the professor he works for is insistent upon solving the crime.

This was a pretty good story, but the mystery was not nearly as puzzling as the back copy would have me believe.