eyes.2c Reviews

The Monastery Murders (A Stanton and Barling Mystery #2)   by E.M. Powell   Fascinating medieval murder mystery featuring Aelred Barling and Hugo Stanton. It's 1177, Barling, a senior clerk of King Henry's court and his assistant Stanton will find themselves trekking through the wilds of North Yorkshire to a puritanical Cistercian community at Fairmore Abbey, rather than spending the new year ensconced in the celebrations of London (much to Hugo's dismay!) A White Monk has been found foully murdered. The community has no idea of how such a thing could happen. Barling, as the King's man  has been requested by Ranaulf de Glanville, the King's Justice, to investigate the murder at the instigation of Abbot Nicholas from the great Cistercian house of Linwood Abbey. Abbot Philip of Fairmore Abbey had mentioned a preference for Barling as an astute investigator. He had been struck by Barling's fine handling of a previous incident. What Barling and Stanton find ...

Treacherous Is the Night (Verity Kent #2) by Anna Lee Huber                                       Verity and Sidney Kent may be united but four years of thinking your husband dead means you led a different life. No longer the woman who had a husband to consider, rather a woman grieving and determined to live life, take chances and trying to bury the sorrow.  So it's no wonder Verity and Sidney are experiencing alienation, confusion with seemingly no way of going forward. Add to this Verity being  dragged to a seance where the medium exposes facts that are not to be revealed under the Secrets Act and it seems something more sinister might be looming.  This leads to Verity searching for a traitor, a spy. Verity and Sidney follow a convoluted trail to Belgium with mistrust and murder dogging their steps. Their journey ranges over sites between Germany and France that Veri...

Phoenix Unbound (Fallen Empire #1) by Grace Draven   It's been some time since I've read a fantasy novel with some of my favourite ingredients: #Azarion, son of a clan leader from the steppes of the land of Sky Below, the nomadic clan Savatar, sold by his cousin Karstas into slavery in order to steal his birthright. Now the prime gladiator in the Empire's capital, plotting to regain the freedom and position he'd had so cruelly riven from him #Gilene, a fire witch whose gift of walking through fire means her village offers her up once a year in the place of other village maidens to be sacrificed as the Flowers of the Spring by the empire to deities.  (The conundrum being that Gilene could save herself but that would mean the death of those the village  and tradition deems she must protect. The physical personal cost to her is agonizing. “It isn’t fire that burns me; it’s the magic I use to summon it. It comes with a price.” The emotional cost is also enormous and ...

The Two-Pencil Method: The Revolutionary Approach to Drawing It All by Mark Crilley.                              Firstly Wow! How creative is this artist! Apart from his drawings, I really enjoyed Crilley's presentation and helpful ideas demonstrated throughout this rather interesting guide to drawing. I loved his no nonsense approach to finding the right pencil. The feng shui aesthetic if you will! "And when you find that pencil, whether it’s the crème de la crème of the art store or a simple writing pencil sold in packs of twenty, stick with it. That’s your pencil. That’s the one that works for you." The practical no nonsense advice is well worth following, particularly if just using as few as tools as possible to draw with interests you. I know that when traveling I only take a few pencils and a small drawing pad. Now I'll reduce those accoutrements even further! Just two will do! A NetGalley ARC ...

Lord of Vice (Rogues to Riches #6) by Erica Ridley                                        Hoyden high society Miss and accounting genius meets unrepentant arrogant gambling den owner. Of course the sparks will fly! When Maxwell Gideon ("tall, dark, and sinfully handsome") sought funds to start his exclusive club (aka gambling den) he little knew he was being financed by Miss Bryony Grenville, daughter of the ton who much preferred to don her brother's castoffs and reckon financial and economic matters, than attend soirées and Almanacks. Now is the time for Maxwell to buy out his silent partner, but that process was meeting dead ends. All Maxwell had to do was find out his partner's name. That was proving harder than he thought. To top it all off he finds a young woman, disguised as a boy in his club after hours. That's when things became decidedly strange, at least for Maxwell. Br...

Conrad Monk and the Great Heathen Army by Edoardo Albert                            The travails of an opportunistic monk with a chequered past who rises in the church through lies, misdeeds and an eye for personal advantage. Conrad is a despicable rogue. A knave, whose rapid rise to importance is owed to his incredible self seeking antenna geared towards his own survival, his silver tongue and ability to turn dross into gold, metaphorically speaking. When the marauding Danes come to call, Conrad looks firstly towards his own survival (most often at the expense of others), and then to lining his own pockets with a share of the loot. His Machiavellian machinations made my head swim, let alone those he was shafting. He's accompanied by Brother Odo, a gentle foil to Conrad, without artifice who seems to survive all by the grace of God. I am never sure if Conrad's success is ultimately owed to some cosmic joke be...