Unleashed

 Shirley J.           Adult Fiction   Texas Rangers,  Cold Cases,  Dysfunctional Families

Unleashed by Diana Palmer    332 pages

Is every book now part of a series?   I get the hook, but, gee, really?      This book is #49 in the Long, Tall Texan series, but, the story does stand on its own.     It is the story of  Clancy Lang, who's mother marries an abusive man with a son older than Clancy.   When her mother dies, Clancy is left living with her abusive step-dad, and her now two step-brothers.   While she is terrified of her druggy older step-brother and her step-father, she adores her younger step-brother and puts her own safety and health in jeopardy protecting the younger child from the abusers in the house.   When things escalate in the home terror runs rampant and circumstances get pretty dire for the siblings.   It is a good story that will keep you interested but, if you don't like your heroes old school Texas Ranger style you might want to avoid this series.   However, if you enjoy a good female victim/hunky he-man story then this one is right up your alley.   I liked the story, the do as I say woman stuff - not so much, but, hey, it was the stry that was told.   I would recommend it this story to romance and urder mystery readers who like larger than life heroes in the mix.  There were many good elements to the story.

Who Killed These Girls?

Who Killed These Girls?  Cold Case: The Yogurt Shop Murders by Beverly Lowry, 373 pages

On December 6, 1991, firefighters in Austin, Texas responded to reports of a small fire at an "I Can't Believe Its Yogurt!" shop in a suburban strip mall.  Inside they discovered the raped, murdered, partially burned corpses of four teenage girls.  Two young men were subsequently convicted of participating in the crime, but after ten years in prison they were released and all charges against them dropped.  The real perpetrators have never been caught.  

Beverly Lowry is intimately familiar with Austin.  She knows its neighborhoods, knows its people, and she knows how deeply this horrific crime wounded the community.  Most of all, having herself lost a child to an unknown hit-and-run driver, she knows something of the pain of the families of the victims.  This perspective turns Who Killed These Girls? into something more than an ordinary true crime book - a fact-based meditation on the inexplicable nature of evil and the elusive nature of truth.

No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, 309 pages

Llewelyn Moss is a poor man living in a small Texas town who happens across a satchel containing two million dollars in drug money.  Like a fairy tale gift, the satchel is also cursed, in this case with Anton Chirguh, out to retrieve the cash and kill anyone who impedes or even inconveniences him.  Pursuing them both, and trying to make sense of it all, is the protagonist, aged Sheriff Bell.

The entire novel has an apocalyptic tint, a sense of virtues gone sour, of a world abandoned by God and running down towards some squalid, preordained end.  Both Moss and Chirguh stubbornly refuse to ever quit, and this leads directly to their respective fates, but the kindly Bell lacks that fortitude.  It is difficult to believe that the author of Blood Meridian means us to take seriously the notion that the world has become that much worse (certainly Chirguh, as terrifying as he is, is no Judge Holden), and certain revelations about the past of the Sheriff and his family reinforce the impression that Bell may be fooling himself by thinking the past was any better than the present.  There may be some hope for the future, after all, presented by the end.  Two boys headed in different directions suggest the possibility of choice, and that the path the world is on (if it is on a path, and not in a place) is perhaps not inevitable, but if that is so, it is one of the few times in the novel anyone seems to have a choice, as the logic or illogic of events push and pull them onward and downward.  Perhaps some of that is the result of the power of McCarthy's writing, which here as elsewhere has an intensity that holds the reader captive and fixes the story firmly in the memory.

Miss Ruffles Inherits Everything

Miss Ruffles Inherits Everything by Nancy Martin
307 Pages

"Rich and flamboyant Honeybelle Hensley, the most colorful character in Mule Stop, Texas, dies a suspicious death and enrages the whole town by leaving her worldly fortune to the most undeserving recipient-her dog. The incorrigible Miss Ruffles is a Texas Cattle Cur, not a cuddly lapdog, and when Honeybelle was alive, Miss Ruffles liked nothing better than digging up Honeybelle's famous rose garden after breakfast, chasing off the UPS man before lunch and terrorizing the many gentleman callerswho came knocking at cocktail hour. But now Miss Ruffles is in danger, and it's up to Sunny McKillip, the unwilling dogsitter, to keep her safe. Sunny is new to Texas, and sometimes she feels as if she's fallen into an alien world. If it isn't the pistol-packing football fans and the sweet-talking, yet ruthless ladies of the garden club who confound her, it's the rowdy rodeo hounds and the tobacco-spitting curmudgeon at Critter Control who have her buffaloed. With a killer on the loose and a cowboy lawyer keeping a suspicious eye on her every move, Sunny needs all the help she can get understanding how Texans think. There's more to Honeybelle's death than meets this Yankee's eye, and Sunny has Miss Ruffles to protect, too. It's a bucking bull ride of an adventure for Sunny, and if she's not careful she might just get killed . . . or her heart lassoed."

It was obvious by the cover that this was not going to be a deep book but I was disappointed that it wasn't more engaging.  I think Martin attempted to created too many colorful characters, so that no one character stood out and engaged the reader.  There were moments I really enjoyed but Martin had trouble with the overall plot moving along and presenting the reader with a mystery.