Reader’s Diary

Steven Saylor

This novel has all the faults of its predecessor plus some new ones of its own.

Juan Gomez-Jurado

A priest-spy, the Vatican, the CIA, and the Ark of the Covenant.   Competently done, but not interesting enough to make me read the first book featuring Father Fowler.

S. Thomas Russell

This is the sequel to “Under Enemy Colors” and is a solid example of the fighting sail genre.  I can’t get enough of this stuff.

John Birmingham

“After America” is the sequel to “Without Warning“.  In it, the few remaining Americans try to recover their decimated and nearly empty country, facing internal struggles and external threats.  It’s a typical “middle of the trilogy” book, building on the first, setting up the last, but not quite able to stand on its own.  The momentum of the very good first book carried me through this one, but I hope the story picks up speed in the subsequent volumes.

Steven Saylor

Saylor uses one fictional family to tell the story of Rome from its founding through the end of the Republic.  I read it because I have an ongoing interest in Roman history, but Saylor is no Michener (he’s not even a Rutherfurd) and his exposition, consisting of long-winded speeches in which two-dimensional characters tell other characters things they would already know for the reader’s benefit is awkward.

Taylor Anderson

I was really looking forward to the continuation of this lost-in-time series.  Sadly, it was a disappointment compared to the last one:  slow moving with too much exposition and not much payoff.  I hope it’s just a stumble not an end to what up to now was a high-quality series.