Two step-cousins — Australian socialite Daisy Munroe and UK lawyer Louis Oakley — inherit a declining New Zealand vineyard, Oakley Wines …
The joint heirs have no experience with wine-making or New Zealand rural culture, and each is having financial, social, and existential crises. They become interested in the winery’s future but frequently don’t see eye-to-eye. …
Some nudity. Randy Kiwis.
General nonsense.
I really like Trae Te Wiki as Tippy (Isabella) Bidois: Oakley’s young, adventurous and newly successful vintner/winemaker.
Not his best — but Koontz is a genius of the interesting plot.
And he’s a very good story teller.
It’s a horror story. But one with a surprisingly uplifting ending.
… Billy Wiles has not even turned on his PC since his fiancée Barbara fell into a coma several years ago. Leading the life of a recluse who spends his spare time alone at home doing woodwork, he leaves his secluded house only when he goes to work as a bartender. …
… takes the law into his own hands when, out of the blue, he is threatened by an anonymous adversary ..
The show revolves around the personal and professional life of Peregrine Fisher, … who inherits a fortune when the famous aunt she never knew goes missing over the highlands of New Guinea.
Peregrine sets out to become a world-class private detective in her own right, guided by a group of exceptional women in The Adventuresses’ Club, of which her aunt was also a member.
This is the first full novel (2006) in Steve Berry’s Cotton Maloneseries.
Comparisons to The Da Vinci Code (2003) are inevitable. This is a mystery involving the supposedly extinct order of the knight Templar, and their most treasured secret, the Great Device.
There seems to be a religious thriller genre.
Personally, I can’t recommend this book. The story and characters were not compelling for me. And the puzzles used to find the prize too confusing. When the secret is finally revealed, … a let down.
The author was a trial lawyer for 30 years. It took him 12 years and 85 rejections before selling a manuscript.
The ancient order of the Knights Templar possessed untold wealth and absolute power over kings and popes—until the Inquisition, when they were wiped from the face of the earth, their hidden riches lost.
But now two forces vying for the treasure …
Cotton Malone, one-time top operative for the U.S. Justice Department, is enjoying his quiet new life as an antiquarian book dealer in Copenhagen when an unexpected call to action reawakens his hair-trigger instincts–and plunges him back into the cloak-and-dagger world he thought he’d left behind.
It begins with a violent robbery attempt on Cotton’s former supervisor, Stephanie Nelle, who’s far from home on a mission that has nothing to do with national security. …
“The novel’s overcomplicated conspiracies and esoteric brainteasers can get tedious, and the various religious motivations make little sense. - Publishers Weekly.
“A long, tortuous journey to an unsurprising, though thoughtful, end.” – Kirkus Reviews.
I don’t understand what this book is talking about.
An extraordinary ‘nonfiction novel’ weaves a web of associations between the founders of quantum mechanics and the evils of two world wars
The first section of Labatut’s book moves at a dizzying pace. He begins with a guided tour of a chamber of horrors in which we encounter some of the more diabolical inventions prompted by two world wars, and are introduced to a blur of real-life characters including the drug-raddled Hermann Göring, who crushed a cyanide capsule in his mouth to avoid the hangman’s rope …
The real villain here, however, is the chemist Fritz Haber (who died in 1934), who directed the programme of poison gas attacks that killed tens of thousands of soldiers in the first world war, an accomplishment that drove his disapproving wife to suicide. …
After this hair-raising opening we are launched into somewhat more tranquil regions of spacetime, where float more familiar characters such as Einstein and other 20th-century physicists and mathematicians …
The second half of Labatut’s book is largely taken up with the struggle for supremacy in modern physics between Erwin Schrödinger and Heisenberg. …
Labatut has written a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present.
Rick McCharles 