Fin­ished Noth­ing to Lose by Lee Child. This is one of the many books in Child’s series about ex-military police­man Jack Reacher.

In this one, Reacher is trav­el­ing through Col­orado when he stops in the town of Despair to get some­thing to eat. But before he can get a cup of cof­fee, some locals come along and tell Reacher to get out of town — now. Of course, Reacher doesn’t take too kindly to this, and he decides to find out what the good cit­i­zens of Despair are hid­ing — and it’s some­thing more dan­ger­ous than he first imagined …

I’ve read and enjoyed many of the books in this series, but I did not like this book – not at all. For one, the plot is kind of bor­ing. Reacher spends most of the book sneak­ing into the town of Despair and caus­ing trou­ble, when he’s not hang­ing out with a pretty female cop in the next town over, which is named Hope. I just didn’t feel like there was as much action in this book as in the oth­ers in the series.

Plus, Reacher dis­patches all the bad guys way too eas­ily. Even when the odds are like 6-to-1, Reacher comes through with only a few cuts and bruises. And the main vil­lain just isn’t that scary or effec­tive. I don’t mind read­ing about larger-than-life heroes, but you have to have a vil­lain that really gives your hero a run for his money — and this book just didn’t have that. When your hero  steam­rolls over every­one the way that Reacher does, well, it’s just not as fun to read.

But my biggest prob­lem was the end­ing, which I thought was com­pletely ridicu­lous. Reacher spends so much time try­ing to fig­ure out what’s going on in Despair, but the rev­e­la­tion just didn’t live up to the expec­ta­tion for me. Plus, the leaps of logic that Reacher makes are just stag­ger­ing. I love smart heroes, but again, Reacher is so much smarter than every­one else, that it doesn’t make for a fun read. In fact, Reacher kind of comes off like a pompous know-it-all in this one.

Over­all, I think this is the worst book in the series that I’ve read. I’d skip this one, unless you’re a die-hard Reacher fan. Even then, read Bad Luck and Trou­ble or one of the other books instead.

My grade: F.

Would I read this author again: Yes. Despite the fact that I didn’t enjoy this one, I still like the Reacher series a lot and will read the books as long as Child writes them.

Up next: Demon from the Dark by Kres­ley Cole.

Books in my TBR pile: About 20.

So the release of Venom, the third Ele­men­tal Assas­sin book, is com­ing up on Sept. 28, which means that it’s time for me to do another blog tour. 

Why do I do blog tours? Well, for a cou­ple of rea­sons. First, it’s a free and easy way to pro­mote my books. There are tons and tons of great book blogs out there. Pro­mo­tion is all about hav­ing an online pres­ence these days, and I think doing a blog tour is one of the best ways that you can get the word out about your books, espe­cially if you’re a new or midlist author. And did I men­tion that it’s free? All it’s going to cost you is a lit­tle bit of time and some postage to mail books out to give­away winners.

Sec­ond, it’s just fun. I like vis­it­ing other blogs, interacting with folks, and see­ing what they have to say about my blog post or books or what other titles they’re read­ing and lov­ing right now. I can’t tell you how many book rec­om­men­da­tions that I’ve picked up just by doing guest blogs. To me, that’s just the icing on the cake, since I’m always on the look­out for new books to read.

I’m pretty ambi­tious when it comes to blog tours. As soon as I have my e-ARC, I send it out to var­i­ous book blog­gers and start ask­ing folks about guest blogs. I’m kind of anal in that I like to work well ahead. Then again, since I have a day job, I sort of have to. 

The Venom blog tour is def­i­nitely my biggest one to date. I’m sure folks are going to get real sick of see­ing my name all over the place in the com­ing weeks. LOL.

Any­way, here are the blogs that I have set up so far. I’ll be post­ing links to all of these here on the blog, my Face­book fan page, and my Twit­ter page as the var­i­ous dates approach. I’m also giv­ing away at least one copy of Venom with most of these posts.

Sept. 7: Rex Robot Reviews  

Sept. 15: The Romance Reviews

Sept. 16: The Book Binge

Sept. 17: Ellz Readz inter­view  

Sept. 19: Amberkatze’s Book Blog

Sept. 20: All Things Urban Fantasy

Sept. 21: Lit­er­ary Escapism

Sept. 22: Lovin’ and Livin’ Life in the 808

Sept. 23: Fresh Fic­tion

Sept. 23: Fic­tion Kingdom

Sept. 24: Shiloh Walker’s blog

Sept. 24: Fic­tion Vixen Book Reviews  

Sept. 27: Paper­back Dolls

Sept. 27: Smexy Books

Sept. 27: Book Talk with J&J (aka Romancing-The-Book)

Sept. 28: Bit­ten by Books

Sept. 29: True Romance Blog

Sept. 30: Mag­i­cal Musings

Oct. 1: Book Crazy Scrap­book Mama  

Oct. 4: A Buck­eye Girl Reads

Oct. 5: Books and Things

Oct. 5: SciFi Guy

Oct. 6: Smokin’ Hot Books

Oct. 6: The Romance Dish

Oct. 7: The Book Smugglers

Oct. 8: Super­nat­ural Snark  

Oct. 11: Urban Fan­tasy Reader

Oct. 12: Para­nor­mal Haven

Oct. 14: Dark Faerie Tales

Oct. 18: All Things Urban Fantasy

Nov. 2: Night Owl Reviews

Nov. 9: Larissa’s Book­ish Life

Whew! That’s a lot of blogs, but I think the tour will be a lot of fun. And I’m always open to doing guest blogs — it just doesn’t have to be when I have a new book out. So if you want me to drop by your blog some­time, send me an e-mail.

What about you guys? Do you like blog tours? Why or why not? Share in the comments.

It seems like every­one is talk­ing about e-books and e-readers these days. Which e-reader to buy, which for­mats it sup­ports, who has the best e-book prices, and whatnot.

I have a con­fes­sion to make — I don’t have an e-reader, and I don’t plan on get­ting one any­time soon.

Why not? Well, mainly because I like paper books so much. I like the way they look and feel. I like being able to pick them up and browse through them in the store. Heck, I even like the way they smell. That musty tang in the air in libraries and used book­stores always makes me smile because it means that I’m in a place where there are books — and lots of them.

Price is another issue. Most of the prices for the e-readers that I’ve seen are more than $100. That seems kind of steep to me. And I’ve seen a lot of blog posts were a lot of read­ers have had prob­lems with their e-books. It all kind of seems like a big has­sle when I can just open up a paper book and start read­ing it with­out hav­ing to worry about if I’m even going to be able to open an e-file or not.

Plus, I spend all day on the com­puter at work and then again at night doing book stuff. When I have time to read, I don’t want to do it on the com­puter or on any kind of elec­tronic screen. I want to curl up on my couch, put a blan­ket over my feet, and have the book on my lap.

Don’t get me wrong. I know plenty of folks who love, love, love their e-readers. One of the ladies in my book group brought her Kin­dle to one of our meet­ings and let folks play around with it. I thought it was cool, and I can cer­tainly see the appeal of car­ry­ing thou­sands of books in some­thing that’s only a lit­tle big­ger than some people’s wal­lets — and being able to down­load more instantly. That’s another rea­son why I don’t get an e-reader — I’d spend tons and tons of money on books. Well, more so than I do now any­way.

But I just don’t think an e-reader is for me. Maybe I’ll change my mind some­day — or at least when the prices drop below $100. But for now, it’s good, old-fashioned paper books for me.

What about you guys? Have you jumped on the e-reader band­wagon? Why or why not?

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the death of pub­lish­ing, espe­cially with romance pub­lisher Dorch­ester pos­si­bly drop­ping its pro­duc­tion of mass mar­ket books and going to an e-book/print-on-demand model.

You can read about it at Pub­lish­ers Weekly, and there’s also a good post at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. Tons of other blogs like Dear Author have also weighed in on this. Do a Google search, and you’ll find plenty to read. How­ever, also accord­ing to Pub­lish­ers Weekly, there is some con­fu­sion about exactly what’s going to hap­pen, so take this post with a grain of salt because by the time you fin­ish read­ing this, some­thing else may have hap­pened or changed.

First of all, let me say that I really feel for all the Dorch­ester authors out there. To be told that your book will be printed one way and then have this major change thrust upon you, well, it sucks. It just sucks. I would be scream­ing and pulling my hair out if some­thing like this hap­pened to me.

So how will this affect pub­lish­ing over­all? I don’ t know, but I think it’s the begin­ning of the end for Dorch­ester. Ink and paper are big, big expenses, and if Dorch­ester does in fact drop pro­duc­tion of their mass mar­ket books, then it will save them some money in those areas.

But by drop­ping the mass mar­ket books, they’re also cut­ting off an impor­tant source of rev­enue. E-books are grow­ing in sales, but I don’t think those sales will be enough to make up for the lack of mass mar­ket sales. What about impulse buys by folks brows­ing in book­stores? Or at Wal-Mart or even the gro­cery store? No mass mar­ket books means no sales that way. Plus, I just don’t see read­ers pay­ing $12-$15 for trade books, which is what the Dorch­ester POD books might be priced at, accord­ing to one of the PW articles.

Personally, I don’t mind spend­ing $8 for a mass mar­ket paper­back. But when the price goes above $12, even if it’s a trade paper­back or hard­cover, then I think twice about buy­ing it. If it’s some­thing I really, really want, then I shop around. Usually, I end up buy­ing the book at Ama­zon, just because it seems like they have the best prices on trade paper­backs and hard­cov­ers. For exam­ple, I ordered a hard­cover of Catch­ing Fire the other day at Ama­zon because it was less than $10 — and so was Mock­ing­jay.

So I don’t know what the Dorch­ester news will mean in the long run, but I do know this — it’s an inter­est­ing (and scary) time to be in pub­lish­ing right now because no one knows what the future will bring. I’ve got my fin­gers crossed that every­thing works out okay for the Dorch­ester authors affected by this. I’m send­ing well wishes your way, folks.

So Whee­z­ley and I went to see The Expend­ables this week­end. This action movie has tons of stars in it — Sylvester Stal­lone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lund­gren, Stone Cold Steve Aus­ton, Terry Crews, Randy Cou­ture, Eric Roberts, Mickey Rourke. If you like action movies, this is pretty much your dream cast. There are even cameos by Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger and Bruce Willis.

Basi­cally, the story is this: Sly is the head of a mer­ce­nary crew that goes around the world and does things like res­cue hostages. Sly and his crew are approached by Bruce Willis to go down to the island of Vilena and take out a gen­eral who has seized power. Sly and Jason Statham go down to recon the island, and they meet San­dra, the general’s daugh­ter who is work­ing against her father. Before you can say action movie, Sly and Jason run afoul of the general’s troops and have to escape. But San­dra stays behind, and Sly can’t stop think­ing that he should go back and try to help her. So he and the boys sad­dle up and head back down to Vilena to take on Eric Roberts, who’s made the gen­eral his lit­tle puppet.

What hap­pens from there? Stuff blows up. Seri­ously. I don’t know how big the sets were for this movie, but if there’s any­thing left of them besides charred, matchstick-size pieces, then I’d be shocked.

This movie was a lot of fun. I think it’s really, really cool that Sly got so many action stars together in one movie. I wish they made more movies like this where it’s all a big col­lab­o­ra­tion, and every­one gets a moment or two to shine.

Let me just say, though, that the years have not been kind to some of these guys. Willis still looks good, but Sly, Arnold, and Mickey aren’t look­ing so hot. But you know what? The lines on their faces and their world-weary atti­tudes worked well for this movie.

This movie is all about the action. Sly has his guns, Jason and Mickey have their knives, Jet has his quick fists, and Terry Crews has a very loud auto­matic shot­gun, among other things. There are sev­eral cool action sequences in this one, lead­ing up to an explo­sive finale — lit­er­ally. I can­not stress enough how much stuff blows up at the end of this movie. The good guys are quirky and heroic, and the bad guys are totally eeevil.

My only lit­tle quib­ble is that I would have liked the action scenes to be shot a lit­tle wider so I could actu­ally see the guys fight, instead of just their fists slam­ming into each oth­ers’ faces.

Over­all, this one was just bloody, vio­lent, action-packed fun. I hope they make a sequel because I’d love to see all these guys together again.

My grade: B.

Quotable lines: There are sev­eral. I espe­cially liked Jet Li’s riff on how he needed more money because he was smaller than the other guys.

Would I watch this movie again: Sure. I’d catch it again on cable, and I’d go to the the­ater to watch a sequel.