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Hemlock Bay

Hemlock Bay

List Price: $37.95
Your Price: $26.57
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Little Lilly the Gnarly Punching Bag
Review: A bit far fetched, but pretty good, presided over by the all-knowing hermaphrodite god, MAX. Whenever there's action, poor Lilly gets whacked. Would a person recovering from a nearly fatal accident and the removal of her spleen be capable of such exertion?

I prefer a story that ties everything together. Wilbur Wright's adventures really don't have anything do with anything else in the book, so they could have been left out. Why was Tennyson so intent on Lilly's seeing Dr Rossetti? Savich somehow arranged for Tammy to find out the phone number, but we never learn how. What was so important about the black circle? Also, it would have been interesting to learn if both twins had these powers, and how they got them. What's wrong with these Swedes?

Unfortunately, it appears that Coulter's idea of great art is something along the lines of Norman Rockwell. And speaking of sentimentality, the lovely-dovey family scenes go a little overboard. She doesn't have to lather Sean in so much saccharine.

The main attraction of this novel is that I have never read a book that uses the word gnarly so many times. I began to look forward to seeing how Coulter would find another place for gnarly. Here are a few more. You may cut them from your screen and sprinkle them through the book where you please: gnarly gnarly gnarly gnarly gnarly


Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Justification to Run Background Checks & a Morphing She-He
Review: Catherine Coulter has managed to combine two surreal plots into one storyline that oddly comes together in the end. One subplot involves the latest case of FBI duo, Savich & Sherlock; the second involves the chaotic life events of Savich's sister, Lily.

Savich & Sherlock are on the hunt for a psychotic kidnapper/murder, that just happens to be morphing he/she. One moment the killer is a character named Tammy Tuttle - the next, Timmy Tuttle, making an easy capture evasive. Whacked enough to almost be humerous, I was still creeped out enough to keep my nightlight on a little longer than usual. Weaving in and out from these shenanigans, Lily's blightened life unfolds. Her young daughter recently died. Her husband seems a little TO eager to help her pop some pills. And to top it all off, she almost dies in a bizarre car accident, meant to look like a suicide attempt. But is it all what it appears to be or is there more to the story??? Luckily Lily has her connections with the FBI...(although I am thinking she needed this help BEFORE marrying into this creepy guy's family...but then again, what kind of a story would that be?)

All this and the best line in the book (in my opinion!) is: "... as hot and wild as a sirocco blowing up from the Libyan desert." Whew!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Justification to Run Background Checks & a Morphing She-He
Review: Catherine Coulter has managed to combine two surreal plots into one storyline that oddly comes together in the end. One subplot involves the latest case of FBI duo, Savich & Sherlock; the second involves the chaotic life events of Savich's sister, Lily.

Savich & Sherlock are on the hunt for a psychotic kidnapper/murder, that just happens to be morphing he/she. One moment the killer is a character named Tammy Tuttle - the next, Timmy Tuttle, making an easy capture evasive. Whacked enough to almost be humerous, I was still creeped out enough to keep my nightlight on a little longer than usual. Weaving in and out from these shenanigans, Lily's blightened life unfolds. Her young daughter recently died. Her husband seems a little TO eager to help her pop some pills. And to top it all off, she almost dies in a bizarre car accident, meant to look like a suicide attempt. But is it all what it appears to be or is there more to the story??? Luckily Lily has her connections with the FBI...(although I am thinking she needed this help BEFORE marrying into this creepy guy's family...but then again, what kind of a story would that be?)

All this and the best line in the book (in my opinion!) is: "... as hot and wild as a sirocco blowing up from the Libyan desert." Whew!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Supernateral Highjincks
Review: Catherine Coulter's new mystery Hemlock Bay brings back two of my favorite characters, Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock, who are now married and have a child, Sean. Savich's sister,Lily, is in a terrible mess which involes her husband of 18 months,his parents and her Sarah Elliot paintings. Lily is helped by a friend of her brother's ,Simon Russo, who is an art dealer of sorts and discover's that four of Lily's paintings have been stolin and replaced with very good forgeries. Savich and Sherlock are also on the trail of the Tuttle brother's who kidnap young boys and then kill them. The Tuttle brother's are not what they seem. The supernatural highjincks involve the Tuttle's and and unknown force only known as the Ghouls. Overall I enjoyed the book. It was a fast read and fun. Ms. Coulter is getting better with her modern mysteries. I do enjoy her historical romance novels more but, I am becoming a fan of her modern mystery novels as well.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Will the REAL Catherine Coulter please stand up!?!?
Review: I just finished reading this book over the last three days and I feel like I wasted valuable personal time. This latest installment of Savich & Sherlock was a real disappointment.

The story finds our daring duo on the trail of a serial killer who is either male or female, has supernatural skills and can only be seen in her true form by secret agent man, Dillon Savich. I've never been a fan of mixing supernatural hocus-pocus with suspense. It never seems to add to the believability. Are their killers who seem superhuman and are hard to catch...of course but magically disappearing from crime scenes is lame. It also gives our hero and heroine less validity as top crime fighters.

The major reason to keep reading the book is the sub-plot of Lily Frasier's stolen artwork. Lily is Dillon's sister and has survived an abusive husband, her daughter's death, a new marriage where she has supposedly tried to commit suicide twice, and just had her grandmother's paintings stolen. Enter a college friend of Dillon's, Simon Russo. He is an art broker and helps Lily track down the true whereabouts of her grandmother's paintings. I liked the underworld of forged and stolen art by ruthless collectors. This really should have been the story.

I hope that the next installment is written with more care since this is definitely the weakest book in the series so far.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great Read
Review: Lots of bad criminals and serial killers in this one, but the story is top-notch. I like Sherlock and Savich as a husband-and-wife team, but I'm still getting used to the baby.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Madness, Murder and Mishaps
Review: The latest in the series featuring FBI agent Dillon Savich and his wife Lacey Sherlock involves two subplots: a kidnapping of two teenage boys and the apparent suicide attempt of Dillon's younger sister Lily. Lily's daughter died in an accident 7 months ago, and she has been depressed and distraught since then, but her brother and sister-in-law believe that she is not suicidal and that someone is trying to kill her.

The complicated plot involves Lily's second husband, who apparently is not as sincere and loving as he pretends to be, Simon Russo, art broker, and the invaluable paintings, now worth millions, left to Lily by her grandmother.

The subplot involving the counterfeit paintings is interesting and believable, and the developing relationship between Lily and Simon is worked out to a satisfactory conclusion; however the plot involving the kidnappings and the bizarre, evil woman who ruthlessly preys on innocent victims is incredibly weird and contrived and not well integrated with the rest of the book.

The author should have developed one plot or the other, but not both in the same book. Some of the characters are not well developed, the dialogue is stiff and contrived, and some aspects of the plot just plain silly. Fortunately, I borrowed this book from the library, so it wasn't a waste of money as well as a waste of time!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: I'd like my time back
Review: This is possibly the worst book I've ever read. This had some of the worst dialogue I've ever read and most of the details in the book were used multiple times and were completely unnecessary. The story was completely implausable and offered no explanation as to any information behind the supernatural phenomenon. Not even the characters in the book are confident enough to state that the criminal had supernatural powers or if she was just some david Copperfield wanna-be. What was up with the cartoonist sister who drew some terrible comic strip. An androgenous computer, an androgenous criminal? Crazy swedes. Sure, I like to suspend my beliefs and enjoy out of this world stories, but this was just garbage. After 5 pages I knew that it was bad, but was compelled and perversely curious as to how bad the book could really get. I should've stopped after the five pages. How is that a NYT bestseller? No one in that books should be named sherlock unless it's someone looking for talents because Ms. Coulter doesn't have any.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: ...not even from the library
Review: This is the first and last Catherine Coulter book I'll read. I struggled through 189 pages or so and threw it away. The characters are wooden and so is the dialogue. People I know don't talk like that.

She doesn't give the reader enough to do since she lets us hear what some of them are thinking.

Disappointing.

She presumes I know who these people are from all her other books but I haven't read them and won't.


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