Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White

Pssst. Wanna know a secret? You don’t have to be a dad, or even have kids for that matter, to enjoy the hell out of The Geek Dad’s Guide to Weekend Fun.

The follow up to his book Geek Dad, in The Geek Dad’s Guide to Weekend Fun author Ken Denmead presents a wide range of activities designed to bring parents and kids together for hours of fun and education.

Each project is clearly broken down with a chart that gives you an idea of cost, difficulty, duration (how long it will take), reusability, and the tools and materials required. And while some projects will require an expenditure, Denmead goes out of his way to structure most around common household items that most will already have readily accessible.

The projects themselves range from educational (Did you know you can measure the speed of light using nothing more than chocolate and a microwave? Sure can.), to cost saving (Tired of spending tons of cabbage on role playing games? Then learn how to make your own combat card games and terrain pieces.), to downright James Bond-esque (Seriously, who wouldn’t want to know how to build a backyard zip line or Nerf dart blowgun?!).

And since the whole idea behind the book is to promote learning through hands-on activity, many of the projects also include a section called “Extra Geeky Ideas” that suggest variations and ideas for further customizing the project or experiment to encourage kids to use their immaginations. Similarly, where applicable there are sidebar boxes called “Quick Science Lesson” to help kids further understand the concepts behind the projects and experiments.

No question about it, The Geek Dad’s Guide to Weekend Fun is a great book for parents, kids, and those who are still kids at heart. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think there are two trees in the backyard that would work perfectly for that zip line.

The Geek Dad’s Guide to Weekend Fun is available from Gotham Books (ISBN: 978-1592406449).

Reality check: The success of my business plan involves doing business with organized crime. – Darby Stansfield

Chop Suey is what would happen if you threw Glengarry Glen Ross and Office Space in a blender. Then added a serial killer. And Triads.

Telecommunications salesman Darby Stansfield is desperate. Having hit a bad stretch with his sales, he’s been put on notice he’s got six months to get his numbers headed in the right direction again or he’ll be fired.

Problem is, Darby doesn’t have any good leads. The one decent client he had was stolen out from under him by another salesman, leaving Darby with nothing but one-sale, dead end, mom-and-pop clients.

When a conversation with Mr. Fu, the owner of his favorite Chinese restaurant, brings up the subject of Triads inspiration strikes… he will tap into a previously untapped source of clientele and become a telecommunications specialist for organized crime. Darby will help the “organized” get organized.

Knowing he needs a bit of room to operate without being too scrutinized by the home office in San Francisco, Darby decides to branch out. To Hong Kong. Following up on information obtained from Mr. Fu, Darby actually manages to connect with the Fan Gang Triad, sell them on his plan, set up a fake toy company as a front for the operation, place a massive first order, and before you know it he’s on his way back to the top of the leaderboard. Coffee time, right? Wrong. (more…)

All the memories and all the lies were like that game, Jenga. Pull out the wrong one and they’d all come crashing down. – Vinny Shepherd

Detective Sergeant Hunter McKenna’s world is crashing down around her. Two teenagers have been found dead under suspicious circumstances, and McKenna’s investigation into the deaths leads places some would rather she not go.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, her former partner, Tom Shepherd, has been shot and killed by his own daughter, Vinny. It would be an upsetting investigation under any circumstances, but added to the mix is that McKenna was once involved with Shepherd, an involvement that some say lead to the collapse of his marriage.

Shepherd’s ex-wife, Rose, is one of those people, and she blames McKenna for his death. Rose claims that McKenna’s questioning of the Shepherds’ daughter, Vinny, about the deaths of her friends pushed the emotionally fragile girl over the edge. With the help of her powerful new husband, Rose brings pressure to bear on the District Attorney, forcing him to pursue a case against McKenna for negligent homicide.

Now the only person that can help McKenna is the very person she’s accused of having driven to murder: Vinny Shepherd. (more…)

As time went by and I moved up the ranks to Homicide I realized that some cases don’t get solved…ever. – Sophie Anderson

For thirty years FBI profiler Sophie Anderson thought her brother’s case was one of the ones that was going to go unsolved forever.

Just a young girl when her slightly older brother was kidnapped and murdered, the event left a deep impression on Sophie which drove her into law enforcement. She worked her way up through the ranks of the Victoria Police department in her home country of Australia, eventually making it to a position in Homicide.

Her college background in psychology, and dual citizenship because of her father’s status as an American, got Sophie’s foot in the door where she really wanted to be: criminal profiling with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Little could she have imagined that after years of profiling kidnappers, rapists, and murders she would actually be called upon to put her skills to use in a case that hit far too close to home.

Yet, that’s exactly where she finds herself when a call from her parents back in Australia informs Sophie that the police have found the body of a young boy murdered in a virtually identical manner as her brother was, dumped within a stone’s throw of the remote location where her brother’s body was found all those years ago. Now, on leave from her position with the FBI, Sophie heads back home to Australia in hopes that solving this modern day nightmare will help put to rest the demons from her past. (more…)

Tomorrow I will be reviewing Coming Home, the most recent book in PD Martin’s Sophie Anderson series. Today, however, I am pleased to welcome PD Martin for a guest post about the story behind the story.

I used to think there were two types of writers: those who plot, and those who don’t. But, to be fair, while lots of writers sit in these extremes, many fall somewhere in the middle. And some change….

I remember hearing Val McDermid talk at a Sisters in Crime event in Melbourne about how she’d always been a plotter, and then suddenly she found a book going in a completely different direction to what she’d planned. She’d gone from one extreme to the other and talked about how frightening she found the process of writing without knowing exactly what was going to happen next. (I think she said something like “It scared the shit out of me.” – but don’t quote me on that!)

I’m also a writer who’s changed my level of plotting as my career has progressed. Although I never outlined or had a detailed, scene-by-scene overview of what was going to happen in my novel, I definitely plot less now than I did for my first crime fiction book. In fact, by my fourth novel I found myself in a pretty bizarre situation. The first draft was due at the publishers in a month and I was 80,000 words in. One day my mum came over to look after my daughter while I wrote and she could see I was stressed. The conversation went something like this: (more…)