ARC for TAXED TO THE MAX

Excited last week to open one (of two) boxes and find they contained the Advance Reading Copies for my light mystery TAXED TO THE MAX coming out in December from Five Star. This will be a hardback, but I still didn't expect such nice Advance Copies. They're like trade paperbacks.

Now I have to figure out places to send them out to for review. Five Star has already done the main ones so I must dig around and find smaller places. Can't remember if the Atlanta Journal Constitution still does book reviews or not.

Oh well. Guess I'll soon find out.

A COMEDY OF TERRORS

Okay, a quick disclaimer here. I know the author, Graeme Smith, through an online writing group and I did read one of the earlier versions of COMEDY OF TERRORS.

It made me laugh out loud then. When I reread it this weekend, it made me laugh out loud again.

The hero is the Royal Idiot who works for Queen Sonea. Anytime wine's spilled on a visiting dignitary at a state banquet or anytime the army loses a battle... It's always some idiot's fault. And Segorian is that Idiot. He shows up in the right uniform (servant or general or whatever) and gets banished from the kingdom. Then he sneaks back through the back door, ready to be blamed again the next time an idiot is needed.

The queen kind of likes Segorian, though Segorian's a little too dense (he admits women are an open book to him but he never learned to read) to understand the situation, and sends him off on a dragon-slaying mission with some trepidation. No worries. The dragon's too smart and Segorian's too...

Let's just say the dragon turns out to be a main character who helps Segorian and Sonea tackle the bad guy who's coming to eat up all the people of the kingdom.

Oh, yeah. There's always a villain in these things. So in COMEDY, we have mayhem, murder, misunderstandings and misanthropy. All rolled up in one book.

Readers who enjoy the Myth series of Robert Asprin or the Xanth series of Piers Anthony will delight in discovering a new comic fantasy author. I know I did.

SLIM TO NONE

SLIM TO NONE by Jenny Gardiner is a light, humorous slice of gingerbread with whipped cream topping.

Not really. The food and recipes I salivated over throughout my reading brought up this metaphor, but it's still pretty apt. Not quite chick lit and not quite women's fiction, this kind of straddles the two.

Abbie, the overweight heroine, loses her job as a newspaper food critic because she's gotten so fat the restaurant owners recognize her. The editor puts her on a temporary part-time column and gives her an ultimatum: lose weight or forfeit her job.

Perfect. Especially since the sleazy food-section guy (who she thought was so nice because every day he brings her pastries and other exotic confections guaranteed to add the pounds) is filling in at her job!

Now Abbie not only has to lose the pounds to wrest her job away from her stand-in who wants to become permanent, she also has to deal with a husband who wants her to ride on a Vespa, a homeless man she wants to take under her wing, and a best friend who wants to use her to cover an affair.

And this brings her to having to face her own past and the reason she hankers after food so much.

Everyone who's been overweight will get a kick out of this book. No earthshattering problems but lots of funny situations.

But avoid the recipes like the plague.