The Mystery Starts Here

“Blood Thirsty” is one of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time. I sat down on Sunday, started reading and…literally could not put the book down. I would have read it straight through but I had to take care of pesky little thing like feeding my husband, feeding and walking the dogs and sleeping. This is exactly the kind of book I love.

All the action in the book takes place in and around Los Angeles. The story starts out from the bad guys point of view and it’s disturbing. A man and woman have just slit the throat of a Hispanic teenager and watched him bleed out and die. The man admits he perfected his technique by slaughtering a couple of pigs. Now both of them are ready….and you know that’s not going to be good for someone.

Next we switch to the POV of Mike Lomax, an LAPD homicide detective, who narrates most of the book. He and his partner, Terry Biggs are in the process of going to a Hollywood film premier. They’ve been offered money and a contract by a big producer to tell the story of one of their famous cases. The producer invited them to the premier so they could meet, Barry Gerber, one of the most powerful and most hated men in the movie business. When Barry doesn’t show, you just know something bad has happened to him.

Yup, he’s found dead the next day, stuffed in a garbage bin, naked. Biggs and Lomax are assigned to the case and neither they nor anyone in forensics has ever seen anything like it before. Two days later, the prime suspect, another despised show-business bad boy, is found murdered in the same sadistic manner. In spite of the gruesome nature of the crimes, this is one of the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. Biggs has opinions, hysterical opinions, about everything and everyone in Hollywood, and is not shy about expressing them. I found myself laughing out loud several times.

There are plenty of twists and turns in the books that keep me guessing. Just when you think you know who and why the couple is killing Hollywood insiders, there’s another twist and you’re left guessing again. I did have one picky – and it’s not really a plot spoiler. Toward the end, we find out that a character had his throat cut, but managed to call and leave a message on someones answering machine. Hm, I don’t think so. When you’re throat is cut, so are your vocal cords and you cannot speak. However, I let that pass because of the overall excellence of the book.

“Blood Thirsty” is only one is a serious of Biggs & Lomax mysteries by Marshall Karp. You can bet I’ll be looking for all the others to read.

Be sure to check out my latest published book, “Mysterious Gift” an erotic paranormal romantic suspense novella from Cobblestone Press.

Okay, to me, this is a real mystery – how can anyone say “Inglorious Bastards”  is a good movie? I watched it last Saturday and all I can say is….huh? People have been raving about his movie since it came out. I think it’s up for an Academy Award – is that possible? Perhaps I missed something in the movie but…I thought it was a real POS! It made no, zero, not one bit of sense – at least the parts in English that I could understand – most I couldn’t because of the heavy accents. Over half of the movie had sub-titles! AND, many of them faded into the background so you couldn’t read the dumb things. I abhor reading subtitles – I’d rather read a book.

There were so many plot holes in the movie it’s hard to know where to begin. The film starts in the beautiful French countryside during the Nazi occupation of WWII. The Nazis come to the farmhouse looking for hidden Jews. This is supposed to be a dairy farm. There is not ONE cow anywhere. There is no barn. Hmm, I’m guessing Quintin didn’t have enough money in the budget for bovines. There’s more dumb stuff in that scene, but I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen the movie and want to – but really, don’t waste your time.

Then we see Brad Pitt as Aldo Rain (I think – I never could understand much of what he said) the leader of a group of young Jewish men he’s going to train to go to Europe and not only kill, but also scalp Nazis. There are several bloody scenes showing this – and more. Hey, it Tarantino.  The group Aldo’s Indians, is killing and scalping, left and right, the Nazis can’t find them but….where are they hiding? Who’s supporting them? Questions abound.

The movie is very choppy, jumping from one scene to another, never making much sense. I could go on and on, but I already wasted two and a half hours of my life on this dumb movie. If  ”Inglorious Bastards” gets any awards on March 7th, you’ll probably hear me screaming. Trust me on this one – it’s a really, really bad movie.