The Last Speaker of Skalwegian

 

DAVID GARDNER

Stats for my copy: Trade paperback, Encircle Publications, 2021.

How acquired: From the author via Cozy Mystery Review Crew.

First line: Lenny Thorsen watched the red pickup roar into the parking lot, a statue propped up in back.

(Goodreads synopsis below.)

My thoughts: I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this book, but the synopsis intrigued me. What I got was an amusing and somewhat quirky story filled with outrageous characters and situations that still came across as believable. I never knew from chapter to chapter what to expect. Well, that’s not quite true. The further I read, the more I did expect twists and turns and the unexpected.

To give you an example, Lenny, our protagonist, lives in an abandoned top floor revolving restaurant, that has a mind of it’s own. Meaning periodically, with just a few warning clicks, the restaurant would begin revolving, often sending items, such as Lenny’s breakfast, flying, while he grabbed onto something to keep himself from flying. Which I thought just sounded like an utterly fascinating and fun way to live! Lenny is a linguistics professor, who is often distracted by words and their origins. For instance:

‘Disperse’ came from the Latin disperses, which was was the past participle of dispergere (‘to scatter’). Lenny wanted everyone in the world to disperse.

Being a reader who often pauses to look up a word I’m unfamiliar with, I began to look forward to those musings.

All in all I enjoyed my time with Lenny and his group of wacky friends and colleagues.

*I received a free copy of this book from the author and have voluntarily reviewed it*

Synopsis from Goodreads: Professor Lenny Thorson lives in a defunct revolving restaurant, obsesses over word derivations, and teaches linguistics at a fourth-rate college with a gerbil for a mascot. Lenny's thirty-four years have not been easy—he grew up in a junkyard with his widowed father and lives under a cloud of guilt for having killed another boxer as a teenager.

Desperate to save his teaching career, Lenny seizes the opportunity to document the Skalwegian language with its last living speaker, Charlie Fox. Life appears to have finally taken a turn for the better...

Unfortunately for Lenny, it hasn't. He soon finds himself at war with Charlie, his dean, a ruthless mobster, and his own conscience.

Countdown America

M.C. FOX

Stats for my copy: Trade paperback, 2019.

How acquired: Cozy Mystery Review Crew

First line: Isabella put her finger up to her earpiece.

(For the Goodreads synopsis, scroll to the bottom of this post.)

My thoughts: This one started out a bit slow for me, it took about 50 pages for me to really get invested. Which was right about where Isabella, the newly appointed Chief Supervisor at CIA headquarters, first realizes that her children and her mother might be in danger. She's interrogating a man who attacked her, and when he tells her she'll never save her family, she hightails it home, to find signs of a struggle and her mother and her young twins missing.

At one point I became suspicious of one of her coworkers, and I thought to myself “I'm gonna figure this out before Isabella, darn it.” But on the next page Isabella voiced her own suspicions of that same character, which made me hopeful the book would keep me guessing after all. And it delivered! Along with some twists and turns, there's a LOT of action. While Isabella is a kick ass character, a little suspension of belief is still needed. The narrative jumps around, with some chapters focusing on her mother, Valerie, desperately trying to escape the kidnappers and keep the kids' morale up, and other chapters focusing on Andre, a Russian computer code whiz, whose own family have also been kidnapped. He's being forced to work on a computer virus, and if he doesn't cooperate his family will be killed. I felt sorry for him, of course, and despite what he's working on I had sympathy for him.

The virus was what I had a little trouble with. I mean, I know there are some serious ones out there that can cause all kinds of problems if your computer is infected. But this was like a supervirus that would literally destroy our country. I guess that's plausible? I just couldn't quite see how one computer virus could take out a whole country. But, suspension of belief in place.

As much as I liked Isabella, I liked Valerie even more. She's a former agent herself, but never worked out in the field where all the physical action is. While reassuring the twins that their mother would find and rescue them, she stepped up and did everything she could to get herself and the twins away from the kidnappers. I probably related to her a bit more, being a grandmother and not as physically fit as Isabella. I hope that if I were in Valerie's situation I would be as brave as she was.

I will admit that if I came across this book in a store, I probably wouldn't have given it a second glance based on the title and the cover. So hopefully others will look past those. Just one more example of never judge a book by it's cover. I don't know if the author plans to write any further books about Isabella, but I would like to read more!

Goodreads synopsis: After the loss of her husband, CIA agent Isabella Bendel accepts a promotion to Chief Supervisor—a much less dangerous position than what she's accustomed to—so she can raise her two children without fear of leaving her children without any parents. But any illusions of safety are shattered when, while on her Sunday morning jog in a Washington, DC park, Isabella survives a brutal assassination attempt. She hauls her assailant into CIA headquarters, confident she can get to the bottom of why he was after her. Her blood runs cold when she learns the truth... as he was trying to take her out, armed terrorists abducted her children and mother right out of her home. Pushed to the brink of what any mother can endure, Isabella calls on all of her training and deadly skills to get her family back. During this mission, she fights her way through assassins, cyber-terrorists, and duplicitous fellow agents, leading her to uncover a Russian threat that is hell-bent on destroying the United States.