Writers Read: Kylie Brant

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Kylie Brant

Kylie Brant has written over twenty books for Berkley Sensation and Silhouette, a short story for eharlequin.com, and participated in an Iowa authors murder mystery.

Last week I asked her what she was reading. Her reply:

I’m one of those readers who has a book going in every room of the house. One that I’m devouring right now is Cindy Gerard’s Feel the Heat. This one features Black Ops operative Raphael Mendoza and the cool calm B.J. Chase on a covert mission to dismantle a rogue weapons system. Lots of action and adventure coupled with blistering romance…Gerard is a don’t miss author.

I recently finished Colleen Thompson’s Beneath Bone Lake. Ruby Monroe comes home from her tour in Iraq to discover her four-year-old daughter and Ruby’s sister missing. With her home incinerated, and her own life threatened, she has no choice but to turn to her neighbor for help: town bad boy Sam McCoy. But when more and more clues seem to point to Sam as being involved, Ruby begins to fear that she’s put her trust in the wrong man. With a sinister setting and a creepy killer, this one delivers on the chills and thrills.

Occasionally I’m in the mood for a good espionage plot, and Stephen Coonts never fails to deliver. Deep Black was co-written with Jim DeFelice. The National Security Agency dispatches ex-Marine sniper Charlie Dean to Russia to determine why their spy plane was blown out of the sky. Dean hooks up with former Delta Force trooper Lia DeFrancesca and in the course of their mission they uncover an even more alarming plot — one to assassinate the Russian government and overtake the government. More complications arise when they learn that one of the spy plane’s passengers is alive … and sensitive information is about to fall into enemy hands. Coonts’ novels require a good memory for minute plot points and secondary characters, but the result is always a well-knit thriller.

Robert Crais is a fairly recent discovery and I’m glomming all his works. He writes two connected series, one featuring PI Elvis Cole and the other the more enigmatic Joe Pike (who reminds me a lot of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher.) The most recent Crais that I finished is The Forgotten Man, an Elvis Cole novel. The LA police come to Cole with startling news: an old man claiming to be his father has been murdered. Elvis has long been haunted by the abandonment of his father, so the toll the case takes on him is emotional, as well as physical.

Next up for me will be J.D. Robb’s Kindred in Death. (Amazon promised it would arrive this week!) The series is set in 2059, and features the indomitable homicide Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her gorgeous mega-billionaire husband, Roarke. With an irresistible cast of characters and unfailingly intriguing suspense plots, Robb’s books are a special treat that I read straight through.