CBR15 Books 87-91: "Spy x Family, vol 1-5" by Tatsuya Endo

Total page count: 1040 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Agent Twilight is the best spy in the business and he's willing to do absolutely anything to protect his country. For his latest mission, Operation Strix, he needs to get close to high-ranking politician Desmond Donovan. To do this, he needs to be married and have a child and said child needs to be admitted to the prestigious Eden Academy, where Desmond Donovan's son Damien is a pupil. Agent Twilight creates the alias Loid Forger, a clinical psychiatrist, to complete the mission. Since he has to have a child, he adopts a young girl from an orphanage. The adorable Anya turns out to be a telepath and can read minds. She desperately wants a family and reads Twilight's mind to try to be the perfect daughter to him. Twilight/Loid also requires a wife, and so enters into a marriage of convenience to Yor Briar, seemingly a timid office clerk. Unbeknownst to Twilight, Yor is also a skilled assassin, working under the code name "Thorn Princess". Only Anya knows about the secret identities of her adoptive parents, and neither of them knows she can read their minds. 

In the first volume, Twilight needs to create his Loid Forger persona and acquire the family necessary to pull off his mission. He adopts Anya, who he needs to tutor well enough to pass the entrance exam to Eden Academy. He marries Yor Briar, to have a suitable wife and stepmother to his "daughter". After a lot of shenanigans, they get through the family interview at Eden Academy, but it's unclear whether Anya will actually get accepted.

In volume 2, it becomes clear that Anya has in fact got a spot at the Academy. Twilight/Loid wants her to befriend Damien Desmond, the son of his target, but that really doesn't work out too well. The children pretty much become antagonists, but Anya befriends the wealthy Becky instead. Twilight/Loid is a bit despondent, but being a master spy, doesn't let small obstacles hinder him from achieving success. Yor's younger brother Yuri comes to visit the family and is deeply jealous of anyone taking away his sister's attention from him. Twilight/Loid discovers that Yuri works for the Secret Police.

At the beginning of volume 3, Yor and Twilight/Loid have to work together to convince Yor's brother Yuri that they are a happy couple, and have in fact been married for over a year. Yor asks her co-workers for help to be a better wife, and Twilight/Loid is reassured that despite her brother working for the Secret Police, his wife is not a threat to his mission. Anya manages to earn a Stella star, an important academic achievement at school and tells Twilight/Loid that she wants a dog as a reward.

In volume 4, the Forger family acquires a dog for Anya, the fluffy and courageous Bond, who can occasionally see the future. Bond is part of a gang of dogs trained by terrorists (who also kidnap Anya for a while), but Bond and Anya work together to foil the terrorists, with some assistance from both of Anya's parents.

In volume 5, Yor tries to become a better cook, since her cooking efforts hitherto have been dreadful. Anya manages to help Damian win an art prize at school but is terrified when she realises she will have to sit the midterm during the dark of the moon, the one time of the month when her telepathic powers don't work. Yuri, trying to impress his sister, offers to tutor Anya. Twilight/Loid is prepared to break into the school to alter her results, making sure she passes, but instead runs into another (much more inept spy) who is trying to alter the exam results of the Desmond brothers, making it seem that they would fail. Anya passes her exams, and Twilight/Loid makes sure that the Desmond brothers' results remain unaltered. In the final chapter of the story, we are introduced to Fiona Frost, one of Twilight/Loid's fellow spies. She secretly loves Twilight and wants to scare Yor away, so she (Fiona) can take her place in the mission as Twilight's wife. 

These manga adventures are ridiculously entertaining, and I've had a lot of fun reading them since I started this summer. I know there is also an anime series, but since it's a right faff making my VPN work properly so I can watch them, I haven't yet gotten around to watching the show (my BFF Lydia loves it, though). I would love for there to be more actual romance between Twilight/Loid and Yor (everyone knows that marriages of convenience eventually lead to actual love, right?), but these stories are so much fun and I can't wait to see where the story goes next. 

Judging the books by their covers: I really like the art style of this manga, and each volume features one of the characters on the cover. Volume 1 has Agent Twilight/Loid Forger on the cover, volume 2 has Anya, volume 3 has Lor (dressed in her elegant assassin costume), volume 4 has Bond (best doggo!) and volume 5 has Lor's extremely unhealthily attached brother Yuri. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

#CBR11 Book 86: "Midnight Crossroad" by Charlaine Harris

Page count: 320 pages
Audio book length: 9 hrs 26 mins

Official book description:
Welcome to Midnight, Texas, a town with many boarded-up windows and few full-time inhabitants, located at the crossing of Witch Light Road and Davy Road. It’s a pretty standard dried-up western town.

There’s a pawnshop (someone lives in the basement and is seen only at night). There’s a diner (people who are just passing through tend not to linger). And there’s new resident Manfred Bernardo, who thinks he’s found the perfect place to work in private (and who has secrets of his own).

Stop at the one traffic light in town, and everything looks normal. Stay awhile, and learn the truth...

I really have read a LOT of Charlaine Harris' books. For my sins, I managed to force myself through the entirety of her Sookie Stackhouse series, just to see how it would end, long after I derived any enjoyment from them anymore. I've read her Lily Bard books, where apparently the character Bobo Whinthrop originates (I don't remember him, or much of the plot of the books at all). I have also read all of her Harper Connolly books, where Manfred Bernardo first appears (I vaguely remember him, but nothing of consequence). Generally, I find Harris' books perfectly entertaining while I'm reading them (except some of the later Sookie books, that pretty much just annoyed me), but shortly after reading them, I remember little to nothing of the plots.

Midnight Crossroad, which was adapted into the TV series Midnight, Texas on NBC (cancelled after two seasons) features a bunch of peculiar individuals living in the little town of Midnight in, you guessed it, Texas. Manfred Bernardo, a genuine psychic who makes his living telling fortunes over the phone and internet, moves there after the death of his grandmother. His new landlord is Bobo Winthrop, owner of the local pawnshop. One of Bobo's other tenants is a vampire, who lives with a gorgeous, but apparently very dangerous woman who travels a lot. There's Fiji Kavanaugh, who is a very powerful witch, but hides her actual powers by running a magic shop full of nick knacks. She has a talking cat. There's a nice gay couple, the rather strange reverend who gives non-denominational services at the local chapel (and conducts a lot of pet funerals), and Manfred falls pretty hard for Creek Lovell, the beautiful young woman whose overprotective father runs the gas station.

Harris' books always have a mystery element to them, as well. In this book, there's a group of neo nazis trying to harass Bobo, because they believe he knows the location of his crazy grandfather's legendary weapons arsenal. There's also a dead body found about a third of the way through the story, which turns out to belong to Bobo's ex-girlfriend, who he believed got sick of him and just up and left him one day. No one really believes that Bobo is guilty of murdering her, but it still takes quite a lot of time to figure out the guilty party.

As well as having been on my TBR list for years and years, this book fit into my Monthly Keyword Challenge in October. I listened to it on audiobook and it was perfectly fine, but really nothing more than that. Now, a month and a half later, I am hard pressed to remember any particular details - although I really did like Fiji's cat a lot - and the lisping way the narrator voiced him. My records show that over the years, I've acquired the entire series in various e-book sales, so I will most likely read the second two books eventually, as well, but I'm in no particular hurry to do so.

Judging a book by its cover: As with a lot of books, this one comes with several different versions of cover art. I think I like this one, with it's weird, crooked bird's eye view (which gives me a headache if I look at it for too long) of parts of the little town is my least favourite. Still, I own it in e-book, so it's not like I'll actually look at the cover a lot. I suspect Harris could sell books no matter what the cover art actually looks like.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR2 Books 60-63: The Harper Connelly books by Charlaine Harris

Book 1: Grave Sight
Book 2: Grave Surprise
Book 3: An Ice Cold Grave
Book 4: Grave Secret

Publisher: Gollancz
Total page count: 1216 pages
Rating: 3 or 3.5 stars
Date begun: June 23rd, 2010
Date finished: June 27th, 2010

WARNING! MAY CONTAIN MILD SPOILERS FOR GRAVE SECRET!
As I read all four books in 5 days, I decided to blog about them all in one review. Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse-books are currently enjoying great success, as HBO have loosely adapted them into the very entertaining True Blood. Having been a fan of Harris' Sookie books for nearly a decade, and having also read her Lily Bard-books, I decided that I was curious to see what the Harper Connelly books were like.

Unlike the Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire-series, there is nothing really supernatural at all about these books. Once you accept the premise that Harper Connelly developed the ability to sense where the dead lie, and what they died of, after being hit and nearly killed by lightning, these books are pretty much straight-forward mystery/suspense novels. All four books are easy and entertaining reads, and the series seems pretty much completed after book 4. I think Harris could probably continue the series if she chose, but the various threads begun in the first three are completed in book 4, so if she chooses not to write any more, the readers will not feel cheated.

Harper Connelly and her stepbrother Tolliver Lang travel around the US helping people find dead people. As mentioned, Harper senses the dead after being hit by lightning as a teenager in her parents' trailer. She would have died if Tolliver didn't perform CPR on her until emergency services arrived. Harper's mother and Tolliver's father were high powered and successful lawyers who married, and then started using drugs and alcohol, until they were a lot less successful, and Harper, Tolliver and the lives of siblings became really quite grim. They spent much of their teenage years trying to take care of their baby sisters and fooling the authorities about what really went on in their home. Once Harper's older sister Cameron disappears, however, they have to contact the police, and the family gets split up. Harper got placed in a foster home, Tolliver went to live with his older brother, and their baby sisters got taken in by Harper's religious aunt.

Now Harper and Tolliver make money by hiring Harper's services to people. In Grave Sight, they get called to a small town to find the body of a missing teenager. Harper finds the body, but since she can also determine cause of death if she is close enough to the remains, she discovers that the missing girl was shot in the back twice, and once at the grave of the boy suspected of killing said girl, she reveals that the boy did not commit suicide like everyone suspected, but was killed as well. When it's also revealed that the missing girl's sister was murdered, the plot thickens. Not everyone is happy about Harper's revelations, and both her and Tolliver's lives are threatened before they can leave town.

In Grave Surprise, Harper and Tolliver are called to Memphis by an anthropology professor determined to prove to his class that Harper's abilities are bogus. Instead Harper pretty much baffles his entire class with her "powers", and also, unexpectedly, discovers the body of a young girl in an old grave. The body is that of an eleven-year-old Harper had been asked to find a few years earlier, but as she can only sense dead bodies, not locate specific ones, she was never able to find the girl. Now the case is reopened, and the coincidence of the body being in an old, unused graveyard Harper just happened to be in seems to great for the Connelly/Lang siblings to ignore. They decide to try to solve the murder themselves.

In An Ice Cold Grave, Harper faces her most difficult case yet, when she is called to find a missing teenager in Doraville, North Carolina. He is one in a long line of young men who the town suspect ran away. Harper finds not only his body, but that of eight other boys, brutally murdered, and clearly tortured before their deaths. The town is deeply shocked by her discovery, and the serial killer clearly has no plans to let Harper live to discover his identity.

In Grave Secret, Harper and Tolliver go home to visit their shared younger sisters, and to reveal to Harper's aunt and uncle who are raising them, that their relationship has changed beyond that of stepsiblings. They are also asked by a local rich woman to determine the cause of death of her father. While doing this, Harper also discovers that said rich woman's father's nurse died, not from a burst appendix, but from complications in childbirth. The woman wants Harper's help to find the missing child, even though Harper and Tolliver try to explain that Harper can only find dead people. As the case progresses, however, it seems strangely linked to the disappearance of Harper's sister Cameron all those years ago, and Harper and Tolliver may finally find out what happened to her.

All four books were entertaining, and well written. Harper is a smart and capable young woman, who has been through a lot of difficult things in her life, but is determined to make the best of it. She is often met with suspicion and sometimes even hostility because of what she has chosen to make a living of, a lot of people think that she is a fraud and that she is conning and exploiting grieving families to support herself and her stepbrother.

Tolliver is Harper's assistant, manager, companion and best friend. As Harper often gets exhausted and worn out after doing a job, she needs someone around to take care of her, and she frequently suffers from headaches and muscle aches, even though the lightning strike was years ago. He organizes her life so she doesn't have to.