Confusing. Too many characters introduced too quickly. Just couldn’t get into it.

This young adult fantasy is set in a pre-industrial land where different clans of people carry different genetic “gifts.” Some gifts have beneficial properties, such as the ability to communicate with animals. Others are more destructive, such as the gift of the narrator’s people, to “unmake” any thing, living or inanimate.

Orrec as a young boy is waiting for his gift to manifest. With it he is expected to protect his family’s land, livestock and people from their aggressive neighbors. But when it does come, he cannot control when he uses it or who he uses it on, so he must blindfold himself to keep from turning it on the people he loves.

Orrec tells his story to a visitor from the cities in the Lowlands, where they do not have the gifts and consider them to be folklore. This is a very readable fable, as we learn through Orrec’s narrative more about the gifts and the land in which he lives. But perhaps because this was written for young adults, or because I just finished A Wizard of Earthsea (a very similar story), it all feels too familiar. This would be an excellent book to give a young reader, though, who is just starting to explore the fantasy genre.

The sequel to Red Mars is unfortunately not quite as exciting and a bit more difficult to get through. What could be tolerated in the first book – the endless descriptions of driving around on Mars, the minutiae of Martian geology and terraforming – I was less tolerant of in its sequel, and more inclined to skip ahead. But I did enjoy the climactic Martian revolution while at the same time I was wishing for more social conflict and less hard science. The emergence of a new type of person – the Martian – as well as the evolving ramifications of the anti-aging treatments were fascinating, and I look forward to more elaboration on these subjects in the final book in the trilogy.

Two dance hall girls are murdered in the Minneapolis of the late 1930s, and a slightly retarded man is falsely accused of the crimes. The story alternates between the diary entries of the suspect, Mr. White, and the life of the police detective charged with solving the crime. This contemporary mystery set in the noir world of the past is an engaging story that leaves the reader with a bittersweet feeling.

Pioneer FBI profiler Douglas discusses some of the crimes he has investigated and lobbies for victims’ rights and the death penalty. While the cases discussed and the methods used to profile the criminals are fascinating, the writing is so dry and boring that it was nearly impossible for me to retain my interest.

A Supreme Court clerk learns about a conspiracy through an appeal filed by a lifer and is murdered to cover it up. His brother and girlfriend are soon on the case to track the killer. Baldacci’s writing is frequently plodding, the characters are thoroughly stereotyped, and the plot is both predictable and ridiculous.

While the facts of the case of Tom Capano are interesting, the writing is dry, stilted and peppered with rhetoric. There is no mystery about who did what, no suspense and no question who the bad guy is here. I would have preferred a more novel-like accounting, with a little mystery as to the outcome.

The main character discovers the existence of Old People, a 35,000-year-old cousin species to man with the ability to share racial memories and control the thoughts and actions of others, living among us and waging a secret war against us, with some of his closest friends numbered among them. An interesting concept, but a muddled, ill-developed plot and such thinly drawn characters that it’s difficult to remember who’s who made this novel substandard.

Straub is an extraordinarily literate writer who occasionally produces rich, complex stories like Ghost Story and Floating Dragon, and occasionally produces muddled messes like this one. Every time I started to get into the story, something confusing would throw me right out, and the ending was a thoroughly unsatisfying twist out of left field. (And when will horror writers get over their obsession with H.P. Lovecraft?)

This is one of Cornwell’s “alternate” books – not a Kay Scarpetta mystery, but a thriller featuring a female police chief from Charlotte, North Carolina. This time, she’s in Richmond, with a huge cast of characters who stories all merge into an unclimactic climax. While I liked this one better than its predecessor, Hornet’s Nest, it still didn’t quite gel. I just got the feeling that these characters and this story didn’t mean as much to Cornwell as the recurring characters in her much better Scarpetta novels.