Book Review: Anonymous Sources

Just finished an advanced reader’s copy of Anonymous Sources by Mary Louise Kelly. Overall, it’s an enjoyable read offering suspense, intrigue, and a fast paced plot. I like to think of it as a chick lit version of a Tom Clancy novel as it’s a bit softer and less gritty or coarse in its language and plot sequencing.

The protagonist, Alexandra James, is a American newspaper reporter living in Boston who covers the higher education beat. Her latest assignment takes her to Harvard to report on the mysterious death of a former student on campus and eventually it takes her far outside the bounds of her ordinary job and across the Atlantic ocean to England. Along the way she falls into danger, into the bed of a sexy graduate student, and into the middle of a terrorist plot involving Pakistan scientists, the CIA, the FBI, and the president’s staff in the White House.

Mary Louise Kelly’s prose is generally well written but Alexandra was presented as a bit too dense for my liking. I take forever to pick up on clues (I’m terrible at reading Sherlock Holmes!) and so when I can figure out the bad guys and what’s going on before the protagonist does it seems a bit artificial for me. Having said that, this minor defect does not diminish the novel overall and it’s still worth the read. I will definitely pick up Kelly’s next novel and I recommend Anonymous Sources as one of this summer’s best chick lit political thrillers.

The novel goes on sale June 16th, 2013. You can pick up your copy at a local bookstore or pre-order it on Amazon.com. Happy reading!

Comments

Board Game Review: Expeditions Gears of Corruption

L ast year I reviewed Expeditions and ranked it #1 among all Stonemaier games on account of the challenging intellectual puzzle it presents. This year I have played my way through the new expansion, Gears of Corruption , and I’m delighted to let you know that it makes the base game even better. That the expansion so cohesively builds on the base game should not be a surprise to anyone who closely examines the original box for Expeditions. All expansion components perfectly fit in that box including the 2 new mechs that nestle in the placeholder cubbies clearly made for them. That can’t be coincidence. There might a few features rolled into Corruption of Gears that were developed as a result of consumer feedback on the base game (I’m looking at you, wild meeple), but my theory is that Stonemaier did a Lord of the Rings maneuver with this game and its expansions, designing the entire game with most of the additions integrated up front, and then breaking it into base + expansions fo...

Board Game Review: Hues and Cues

Last week we received Hues and Cues from The Op Games. We recently finished playing through Scooby-Doo Escape from the Haunted Mansion (a fantastic game in The Op Games catalogue designed by Jay Cormier, Sen-Foong Lim, and Kami Mandell that you should absolutely pick up to play with your family) and wanted to give another game from the same publisher a go. I picked Hues and Cues because I’ve been pleasantly surprised by other “test whether our minds think the same way” games such as The Mind and Wavelength. In Hues and Cues , players gather around a large central board comprised of 480 graduating colors of the rainbow surrounded by an x-y axis and scoring table. White and black (which are technically not colors) are conspicuously absent as are shades (mixtures of color + black; e.g., grey) and tints (mixtures of color + white; e.g., cream). On each player’s turn, they draw a card with four colors and the x-y axis codes of those colors depicted and they select one. They a...

Board Game Review: Expeditions

Expeditions is my favorite game in the Stonemaier Games portfolio to date. The game is a sequel to Scythe, and continues the narrative years in the future. It has taken everything I loved in Scythe and expanded on it, while chucking out everything I didn’t care for (the combat). Designed by Jamey Stegmaier, Expeditions brings us into an age when a meteorite has crash landed into Siberia and things begin to go sideways for all who encounter it. One team after another sets out to investigate the crash site and they are never heard from again. No one knows what happened to them. Now it’s our turn to find out what’s really going on, each of us leading a competing expedition team into Siberia to bring back desperately needed answers. During a game of Expeditions, all players are seated around the game board, which is made up of individually placed hex tiles laid out as shown above. At the bottom of the game board is an insert affectionately known as the base camp. The base camp holds ...